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Author: Josh

  • AWS Route 53 DNS Migration Adventure

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    I recently worked with a client to transfer authoritative control of one of their domains to AWS Route 53 and it was a minor adventure. It was trivial to setup the hosted zone in Route 53 and import the zone file, although not all records were created properly. In particular, the MX records that were…

  • EC2 Instance Recovery

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    Amazon has released a feature to EC2 that will allow you to setup a CloudWatch alarm to monitor your EC2 instance and auto recover it if there is a hardware issue. One of the best features is that it will retain the same instance ID, IP address, and instance metadata! Read about it here. While…

  • Tuning EC2 Network Stack

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    I recently had an issue with web requests taking 1.2-1.5 seconds from a service hosted in AWS. I had a small SSD-backed EC2 instance with a small SSD-backed RDS instance running a wordpress site and this type of performance was not acceptable. After a bit of troubleshooting I discovered that the network was suffering from…

  • puppet search function deprecation

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    With the release of puppet 3.7, the search function is now deprecated, and will be removed in 4.0. This is a feature that I had used by recommendation of a puppet cookbook when creating virtual resources and managing users that I have now removed. Using the search function basically added the namespace of an existing…

  • Redmine Issues with HTML Formatting

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    I recently had an issue with a client where we had deployed Redmine with an add-on plugin (CKEditor) that displayed all updates to issues as HTML. This resulted in all new issues and content being created with HTML tags but existing/previous content was not and it looked like a big glob on the page. To…

  • Puppet node inheritance deprecation

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    Puppet 4.0 will deprecate node inheritance which is currently a common way to organize resources. I have been using node inheritance to group common configurations into a basic role and then inherit that with a node declaration like the following: # site.pp … node webserver { # add all generic web server configuration here }…

  • GnuGK with Polycom RealPresence Desktop

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    I recently setup a GnuGK Gatekeeper to facilitate H.323 Video Conferencing registration outside a client network to allow remote personel to register and make calls into and out of the company network. This setup makes it very easy for clients to register and initiate or receive calls from nearly anywhere, as long as H.460.18 is…

  • Book Review: Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

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    I just finished reading “Puppet Reporting and Monitoring” and I gained quite a bit from reading this book and will change the way that I work with Puppet to use techniques that I’ve learned here. I have traditionally used Puppet and other configuration management tools as a simple configuration tool and haven’t expected much back…

  • Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

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    I received a new book from Packt Pubishing: Puppet Reporting and Monitoring. It’s a good read so far and I will be posting a review soon.

  • Rebooting: quick tip

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    Note to self: whenever rebooting a server, login via SSH and restart the OpenSSH daemon first to validate that it will come back up. I just updated an AWS instance and rebooted it without doing this. Some new update in OpenSSH required that the AuthorizedKeysCommandUser be defined if AuthorizedKeysCommand is defined and the OpenSSH daemon…