Author: Josh
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Securing Your Online Presence
One of the issues I help clients with is repairing hacked content and preventing future occurences — I received an email from a prospective client the other day – a wordpress site had been exploited with some pornographic content and they needed help. With WordPress, as with most web services, there are 3 primary attack…
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Critical Server Patching
Last week a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the glibc library was released. This is an important patch to apply to all vulnerable servers ASAP. Impacted distributions: * Ubuntu 15.10 * Ubuntu 14.04 * Ubuntu 12.04 * RHEL 7 * RHEL 6 …and others. One of the services that I provide is server patching and validation.…
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AWS SSL Certificates
One IT task that occurs infrequently but has the potential to cause lots of headache is SSL/TLS certificate management. AWS has just released a Certificate Manager feature that allows customers to provision SSL/TLS certificates through their AWS portal at no charge. That’s great news and will save many companies time and money. The only question…
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El Capitan – ssh-agent / screen sessions lost
After an upgrade to OSX 10.11.1 (El Capitan) I’ve had a number of issues with ssh-agent and screen sessions being lost after being open for a few days. The socket file in /var/folders was removed and the screen session became unusable and the ssh-agent session was also lost. In El Capitan, the screen socket is…
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Multipart uploads to s3 using aws-sdk v2 for ruby…
The Ruby guys over at AWS have done a great job at explaining file uploads to S3 but they left out how to perform multipart uploads citing reservation over “advanced use cases“. Prerequisites: identify an S3 bucket to upload a file to — use an existing bucket or create a new one create or identify…
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Puppet 3.* not compatible with Ruby 2.2.*
Puppet 3.* will not work out of the box with Ruby 2.2. The following error results from the attempt: /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1/gems/puppet-3.8.2/lib/puppet/vendor/safe_yaml/lib/safe_yaml/syck_node_monkeypatch.rb:42:in `’: uninitialized con stant Syck (NameError) from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.2.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:54:in `require’ from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.2.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:54:in `require’ from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1/gems/puppet-3.8.2/lib/puppet/vendor/safe_yaml/lib/safe_yaml.rb:197:in `’ from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1/gems/puppet-3.8.2/lib/puppet/vendor/safe_yaml/lib/safe_yaml.rb:132:in `’ from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.2.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:54:in `require’ from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.2.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:54:in `require’ from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1/gems/puppet-3.8.2/lib/puppet/vendor/require_vendored.rb:4:in `’ from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.2.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:54:in `require’ from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.2.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:54:in `require’ from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1/gems/puppet-3.8.2/lib/puppet/vendor.rb:40:in…
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Ruby, Rackspace Cloudfiles, Performance, and Fog
I work quite a bit with Rackspace cloudfiles and use ruby to upload and download files using the fog gem. There have been some major performance issues with apps that use the fog gem where there is a lack of understanding around how the container get, new, and save methods work. The basic issue is…
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Updating Puppet Manifests to Conform to New Standards
Puppet recently published some new standards to apply to manifests which will require single quotes around switch statement keys and around file object modes. The exception to this rule would be if the key were a variable as then it would be enclose by double quotes. All of this is covered in the recently release…
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Manually creating dokuwiki pages
I recently worked on a project where it would be really convenient to create some dokuwik pages using a script on some html content. I ended up using the CPAN/Perl module to convert HTML content to dokuwiki content, and then script the process necessary to create the pages inside dokuwiki. In general, for a page…
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Latest Amazon EC2 AMI Supports Puppet 3.7.4
Good news! After quite some time without a supported puppet and ruby combination from the EC2 yum repositories, the latest AMI has support for puppet 3.7.4. This will make deploying puppet environments easier and not require use of the gem and the development packages requirement to compile it.