Exploring Azure for System Admins

Throughout my travels, I've come across some interesting things in Azure. This is not a comprehensive list; In fact, it's rather scrappy. I'd go "Oh, neat idea." and stick it into this blog post over months.

Azure Storage Explorer

A lot of information came from this video by HarvestingClouds.

This is using connect with Name and Key. There's an option to use http to connect, but I go with https. We can attach by right-clicking the relevant connection.

Remember when you learned to set permissions on local files?

Of course you do.

You can do the same through the Azure Portal, with a few more features, such as an access control list for IP addresses, and start/expiry dates.

Peering 2 virtual Networks under the same subscription (in the same group. Which may defeat the entire purpose of peering.)

Checking the visitor stats of a static webpage (I brought it down, but you can still see the URL).

Allowing Webapp Login;

Using SSH Keys with Windows on Azure

Article

Video

I have SSH'd into Routers, Switches, things long forgotten. So now let's have a go with a Virtual Machine on Azure, running Ubuntu.

Hitting yes causes the remote host to close the connection. I think the keys may not match.

Also, notice that it doesn't have the SSH at the beginning of the command, only keys. Here, everything works, and I have SSH'd into an Ubuntu VM.

Budget and Storage

$1.29 for storage? In this economy?

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Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return. In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now OpenTofu Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process. Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach. That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init. As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory

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