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Showing posts from 2021

Business Bonus: AWS Outage (12/7/2021)

  There was an AWS outage a few days ago; You were probably impacted in one way or another. If any of my appliances would ever e-mail me, I think I'd die of shock. Every thing from Disney+ to McDonalds was affected, as US-East-1 was US-East-None for a few hours. Even Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers couldn't complete their breakneck, no bathroom, tasks. My Alexa couldn't reach AWS. "Guess I better attach it to the new hotspot..." I thought, before moving on with my day and not doing that. Turns out, my hotspot wasn't the issue.

Case Study: The Offline/Online Laptop

  alt: Three panels of a dog with a toy. Panel 1: 'Pls release IP address'. Panel 2: 'No release', Panel 3: 'Only hold onto expired IP' It's not practical for home internet services to let end users distribute their own IP addresses to their devices. The option is there, but it's far easier to let people use DHCP - You get a pool of addresses for your devices, and the router does the work in distributing them. That way, your devices can talk to each other (Somewhat - in a L2 network, they don’t need IP addresses) and reach the internet! But what happens when one Windows 10 device is unused for months? The device is totally off. It holds onto an expired IP address - and then it can't get back on. That's what happened this week. After scanning with Wireshark, no DHCP packets were being sent at all. The laptop didn't want to connect to any home internet router, of which there were two - The main one and the extender. Flushing DHCP didn&#

Two Factor Authentication and AWS Cognito Identity Pools

There's always a video to watch. Things to learn, labs to try - and a thought hit - What service does AWS provide that allows users to log in with Two Factor Authentication (2FA)? A refresher; 2FA is a combination of what you know, who you are, what you have - and in the future, probably what you ate for breakfast - to log into sensitive systems.  As of 2021, Google made 2FA mandatory for logging in to your Google accounts For the DoD folks out there, that keycard you use to log into a computer is a form of 2FA.  A fingerprint scanner, or an authentication app on your phone also count. Back to the question - Does AWS have options for 2FA if you use their Directory options?

How to Secure Your Linux Webserver

Article I don't remember which distro of Linux Webserver I used - My computer has Ubuntu, so my guess is that flavor. I'm working in datafile.txt - But not so fast! The initial edited datafile.txt file.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0 Update

The long-stagnant game has finally returned - And this time, it's actually finished.  Let's look at a little at what's arrived! Photog Fabulous The new camera features and filters are so fun. I love the eye-level view and being able to turn the camera on its axis. Which axis? You tell me. Fun fact; As I don't have Nintendo Online right now*, I sent these images to my smartphone via QR codes and a closed, ad-hoc network. Much easier than sending 4 at a time to my private Twitter and saving them. * ( Hint: Buy the Happy Home Paradise DLC before you buy the Nintendo Online Premium service; Then you have a copy to play with after your membership expires, as opposed to it being a 'feature' of the membership you can lose ) There are also neat new filters in the in-game camera: The first (surveillance) and third (retro) are definitely new.   Coffee Break Brewster is finally back! One of my favorite pastimes in New Leaf was running to the beach where I had placed The

SD-WAN Cisco Sandbox

  Want to get started using network automation, but don't have a suitable home lab? Cisco, as always, has you covered. The sandbox has configurations with special programming languages (For lack of a more clarifying term) like Ansible, YAML, or JSON, and probably Python. It's reminiscent of Cisco Live's Capture the Flag games, which I've participated in before. The site within the sandbox does not have full connectivity; Is redundancy set up? Are two routers connected to each other and one not? There's more info if you scroll to the right - "Device groups", "up since", "connected vManage", which is an SD-WAN controller that ensures visibility and control from end-to-end.   You'll notice TCP Optimization isn't reachable. This chart is the activity over 24 hours. If I sort by a smaller amount of time - say 1 or 3 - there is no data to show. Here's a reachable device. and here are the active interfaces [vedge01

Bing Webmaster Tools

  The very large "10 books in 1" tome, "Building Websites (all in one) for Dummies", is something I often peruse late at night. The ways of the Old Web give me comfort. But something caught my eye. 💡 "Submit a sitemap to Google and Bing. Yahoo uses the same search options as Bing, so no need for that." Now, this book is not new (There's a section on how you need to put in some XSS code to be able to take PayPal payments on your Webpress site - Is that still a thing?). So, I thought the idea of sitemaps was long gone. However - sitemaps are still in use today! What is a Sitemap? It's an XML file optimized for search engines to find your website, listing every page on your website. "Spiders" crawl pages to index for search engines. Why Bing? I use Bing for my regular searching on the web. I also submitted my sitemap to Google, as my blog is hosted on their platform and my domain is purchased through them. (I'm not sure it work

Get in CloudFormation; A Timeline learning IaC for AWS

  Want to share this page easily?  Here's a Notion Page .   A big shoutout to Pluralsight for their free weekend, and James Millar for a great introductory course . For the longest time, I couldn't see how people found this easy, but this helped. (Why did we make up so many programming languages that only work based upon the correct formatting of spaces and tabs? Readability is important, but when you're just beginning, how I learn, I'm interested in 'it works' first and 'it's pretty' second).   The (paid) project: Create an Instance that has basic security rules from a security group it's in. The most difficult part was learning the tool and the formatting. This was much easier in Terraform (Now OpenTofu) for AWS, but this time we wanted to use CloudFormation.   The Numbers: Resources Created: At least 11 VPC MacOSImageID* MacOSInstanceKeyName* InternetGateway PublicInternetRoute VPCGatewayAttachment PublicInternetRouteTable PublicSubnet01 P

Case Study: The Disappearing Data of T-Mobile

NOTE : The problem has repeated itself. So this doubles as an off the cuff case study in level 1 troubleshooting, looking at data, comparing information at different locations.  Also - I wrote it, and I'm not wasting my time by not publishing it.  I have the Samsung Galaxy A12, and the service through T-Mobile is pretty good. While the infrastructure around our nation is fair at best, it's showing it's age and weakness in storms - and that may apply to private towers owned by T-Mobile as well.  I turn on data, and either: It works The symbol in the upper right does not show up and it's not working. The symbol shows up and the data still doesn't work.     Here's a demo; Other videos are available upon request. Now, there is a setting where I can change the mobile band (2G/3G, 3G/4G) my phone uses, something I was unaware of until a cool Twitter user let me know. This alleviates the problem sometimes, but if I go hours without using data, the problem returns.  Cou

Paint 3D: The Hidden Fun in Windows 10

 You may have no need to use Paint 3D, pre-installed software on Windows 10, for any reason than to have fun. And that's reason enough. Here for a fun time, not a long time.

Business Bonus: Disney. Just Disney.

 The Mouse House is in the news, for some changes people are calling rat-like. If you missed the wheeling and dealing of the release of Scarlett Johansson suing Disney for shortchanging her 'Black Widow' pay, it's one for the history books. But Disney recently released something that may hit closer to home. A pay-per-ride system, Genie+, will be implemented in US parks in the near future. It's reminiscent of the ticket books DisneyLand used in the 60s. Now, it's digital, and apparently similar to MaxPass? Truthfully, I haven't been in a Disney park since about 2012. I'm not a Disney Parks person; I like other aspects of Disney; The Animated Canon and some TV shows. It's a dream of mine to stay at a Deluxe Resort - Riviera or Animal Kingdom's Jambo House. But any further than that, is fun I'll leave for someone else. But I do follow multiple Disney news outlets - and several Disney social media accounts - and most park guests fall into 3 categor

Deploying Docker Containers in AWS and Wandering Around Clusters

  Or, at least learning more about each. And self-learning is the important part, right? And welcome back to not only AWS, but Docker as well. This is a bit of an older post, as I have more experience with Terraform's containerized environments in Azure over AWS. Instructions There is a Console First Run Wizard, here . I have an exceedingly vague idea of what this means in full. Cluster is essentially the pack of what you need to run something. Bing (Yes, Bing), says it's a 'logical grouping of tasks or services'. So 'containers' are the 'physical' grouping, if we consider 'physical = code'. We can define a service, which allows us to run and maintain a specified number of simultaneous instances of a task definition. It sounds a little like a limited pool of IP addresses. This is the free tier, AWS only gives us one. The instructions emphasize Elastic Load Balancing...which took me a while to realize and find. And now the

Using Windows Media Library as A Media Server (Ft. Visio)

 Disclaimer: This was a few months ago, and the image of the TV's file system is unavailable.    The TV? e500i-b1 by Visio. A couple of years old. I also took the time to update some firmware before doing this. You can make your own standalone Media Server with some 3rd party software to be 1337 ....or you can use Windows 10 built in Media Streaming Options. In an uncanny turn of events, Visio already had an app in place for this very situation: The DLNA Multimedia App, accessed by that large V I've never bothered clicking on the remote.                                                     It's between the volume and channel buttons.  After sharing the appropriate library, it does open a file system with my videos and music. It did work pretty well besides one finale hurdle: It wouldn't play the 20+ minute video. Shorter clips - think a few seconds - worked quickly enough to repeat several times as the television took seconds to read my input of "Next screen".

Winning Multiple Data Scholarships

  In April, I was selected - 1 of 1000, out of 10,000 - by the Blacks in Technology Foundation for Python for Data Science. I used SQL to parse and analyze data. Truth - Python isn't my favorite - but I want to learn to tolerate it - I told them this and was still selected. So glad to see an organization accept honesty! In June, the train kept rolling with Intro to Data Science - Granted to me by Women in Cloud, though a partnership with Microsoft. While I didn't make it to the second round of the BiT scholarship, the first part encouraged me to learn more about data and python on my own. It certainly wasn't a waste. If there are any other data scholarships you know of that are open to people out of school, transitioning industries, or just with a curiosity, please let me know - I'm happy to share them!

Totally Terraform (Or, Introducing Terraform DevOps Cloud Engineer Proceedures to A Company) [Updated March 2022]

 Want to share this post easily? Here's a Notion page !   9/20: Terraform is now  OpenTofu   I got to teach myself Terraform, but that's what this entire blog is about; Teaching myself things and hoping for work sometimes to make money and being employed by multiple people. You can be the next one! Anyway, what do I like about Terraform? A lot. Including all the troubleshooting and digging into new things. The Numbers on What Was Made: Project : 1 Resources created : 7 Virtual Machine Network Interface Virtual Network Security Rule attached to Security Group Security Group (with outputs) Subnet Public IP address Many of these resources are attached to each other - The Network Interface is attached to the Virtual Machine, and they’re both in a Security Group which has Security Rules attached to it. The Virtual Network is attached to the Subnet, and the Public IP address is attached to the Network Security Group. This way, The Virtual Machine has internet access, but als

Using Azure Data Studio and SQL Database

    As part of one of my Data Science Scholarships, I am allowed to download the database files. So I thought, why not stick them in a database on Azure for some learning.  They didn't say I couldn't.  LEARN LEARN LEARN. After opening Azure Data Studio, hit 'New Connection'. In order to get the entire server name, go back to azure and your SQL Database, and under 'Settings' on the far left, hit 'Connection Strings'.

The Emoji Ideal; Apple's Memoji and Samsung Galaxy's AR Emoji

I'm here to compare; Because digital dollmakers are a hallmark of my past, present, and future.   Galaxy's AR emoji were a surprise to me, something I learned when placing images for contacts. I realized I saw one multiple times on a website someone was using for personal branding. Besides that, I'm not sure I've ever seen them in the wild. Maybe because I can't figure out how to get to the app on my phone without going to my contacts section - and no one else can either. Because of their simplicity of the smooth heads, emotions on Apple's people emoji - memoji - look better to me.  

Connecting VMs Together in a Virtual Network (Azure)

Check out a better formatted version of this post here , on my Notion. Here - Don't be dismayed by the instructions. The GUI Way? Peering VNets. The Powershell way? A bit more involved. Today's Events: Configure a network security group + security rules using Powershell. The application server should connect to the database server over HTTP. BUT the database server shouldn't use HTTP to connect to the application server.