Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus
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How to make your site more secure with HSTS
And why you should care
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How to enable SQL Server 2008 R2 authentication mode with PowerShell
Some of my friends who follow this blog have told me that they have no idea what I’ve been posting about lately. That’s because my recent posts have been mostly about helping people who are Googling specific questions. If you are one of my pals who who’ve stuck with me here, thank you. I appreciate it.…
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How to use PowerShell in Chef to install Windows Server features
Chef — the wildly popular configuration management system, whose motto is “infrastructure as code” — treats Windows as a second-class client, despite all protestations from from its creator, Opscode, to the contrary. Still, you can do some cool stuff with Windows and Chef in PowerShell, as long as you can stand the Ruby “domain specific language” that Opscode…
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How to display a nicely formatted path in PowerShell
I’m setting up a Chef environment on Windows, and like most devops/architect tools, you need to set the path environment variable to let the system know where all the good stuff is. (Path is one of those things that never dies.) Displaying that path is easy if you use the old Windows command prompt shell.…
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How to use Route 53 private DNS with EFS mount targets
How to use the Elastic File System with DNS
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How to tag AWS EC2 AMI snapshots with a tag from the owning AMI
Sync up Name tags between EC2 AMIs and EC2 snapshots
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Time to pop some stuff off the stack
It’s been a swirl lately. That means limited time to post here. It pains me when I don’t post here regularly. Mind you, I am always thinking about things to say. I’d rather just get it out there in short form than forget stuff. Herewith, a “short stack”. (How’s that for mixing pancake and computer…
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When cryptographers say don’t, they really mean it
Wow, what a week in the public debate on “exceptional” encryption! The OPM debacle, the MIT paper detailing why what the government wants can never be secure and the government’s odd admixture of fear-mongering mixed with hand-ringing all came together for me in the help text for iCloud Keychain (screenshot nearby). It simply says,”Your information…
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AWS: Big? Check. Impenetrable? Nope.
Support done right
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Amazon: say what you think about Echo, as long as you like it
Those of you who know me know that I abhor what I call “marketing in-authenticity”. You know what that is: the uncomfortable feeling you have when you suspect there’s daylight between some marketing claim and the reality of a product. Or the cheesy feeling — the inkling you are being manipulated — when people (today,…
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You say PowerShell braces, I say PowerShell assignments
I am very gratified with the increasing traffic this blog is receiving from a series of posts that describe how to automate tasks in EC2 in AWS with PowerShell. You can see them all here. As with any creative activity involving language, style is both personal and important. I’ve been getting the impression as I read others’…
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How to manage EC2 EBS volume snapshots with PowerShell
One of the best features of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes in AWS is the capability to incrementally “snapshot” these volumes to more durable S3 storage. Everyone knows that if you don’t create these snapshots, one day your production EBS volume will go “poof” and disappear. Is that why the standard AWS icon, nearby, for a snapshot looks vaguely…