- Using AWS Athena and CloudTrail Revisited In 2017 I wrote and article about how to mine CloudTrail logs with AWS Athena, since that time plenty has changed in methods and queries. In this article I update and simplify that information, provides new tips and tricks I have learned, and investigates the new methods AWS has provided
- Investigating AWS Pricing over Time When a coworker asked me if AWS had a historical pricing sheet, I was astounded to find out the answer was no. I went digging into the AWS landscape to find the answers and here is what I found.
- So Let's Talk About Multi Cloud For many businesses, the desire of being on one, two, or even three Cloud vendors is attractive to mitigate financial risks due to untenable price increases and business risks around availability of their critical systems. For other businesses, they want to provide a global reach to their customers where some providers excel in those regions while others do not perform within acceptable parameters.
- Making Modular CloudFormation with Includes When the YAML format for CloudFormation was launched in September 2016, many of the users knew it was only a matter of time until the commonly used pattern of including multiple YAML files into a single file made its way into CloudFormation. On March 28, 2017, AWS did exactly that by launching the AWS::Include Transform, albeit with surprising lack of fanfare.
- Using AWS Athena to Query CloudTrail Logs One of the first things which came to mind when AWS announced AWS Athena at re:Invent 2016 was querying CloudTrail logs. Over the course of the past month, I have had intended to set this up, but current needs dictated I had to do it quickly. When I went looking at JSON imports for Hive/Presto, I was quite confused. Of course, as a trusty technologist I went to Google. Much to my surprise, no one had published an article about using Athena to do this, I was only able to locate EMR based posts which used a custom serde to support the nested CloudTrail format.
- NTP Peerstats Status Word Secret Decoder Ring The Peer Status Word is a multi-byte disaster which represents things to NTP. This post explains how to make use of the PeerStats file
- Using Your Mac's Screen Remotely Without People Watching Long since property of Apple Remote Desktop Enterprise, the ability to remote into your computer without leaving the screen on for all to see has finally shown up, but its in 10.7 only.
- New Site
- Adding VMNet's in VMWare Fusion 4 With the release of VMWare Fusion 4 (and its CONTINUED lack of GUI for network manager), I bring you the instructions on how to add networks to VMWare Fusion 4
- Security in the 'Cloud' As many of you know I am a very big proponent of using the cloud with high automation. At my job we do this in a big way. However, one question always comes to mind, if you share your servers with other physical machines; how can one guarantee security?
- IPv6 Redux
- IPv6
- Puppet Continuous Integration Puppet is an amazing configuration management system as I have previously written, but one downfall is that no system exists where you check in code, it runs, and if it fails, it alerts.
- Cron Job to Ensure Your Puppet Clients Stay Happy
- Adding VMNet's in VMWare Fusion 3 This problem has come up a couple times and I figured out how to do it. It isn't a pretty thing to do, but it works.
- How to Upgrade a Cisco Pix 515 With Serial Failover From 6.3 -> 8.0 Well it sounds simple doesn't it? Cisco says you reload the OS, you make a couple changes and voila, you have a working Pix 515 running the latest and greatest code (which by the way is the same code those ASA's run which cost quite a bit more). Well, not so fast.
- Dance Puppets, DANCE! What an odd title? What has to deal with puppets and system administration? Well, in fact there is a program called puppet. What is puppet? Puppet is a client/server software system put out by Reductive Labs which allows for simplistic management of *Nix (OS X included).
- Where Has the Time Gone...
- Why Linux? Linux is now rapidly becoming the operating system of choice in many core areas of business. It is transforming information technology in many exciting ways from being used in products ranging from cell phones and PDAs to cars and mainframe computers. In addition to being cost-effective, it is constantly being updated and refined with the latest technologies. As Linux gains greater acceptance in todays Information and Communication Technology, more and more companies are supporting Linux both application and hardware compatibility.
- Restricting Login in Linux When we talk about forcing a user to log off, what we're really talking about is time restrictions on certain account system access and services. The easiest way I've found to implement time restrictions is by using software called Linux-PAM
- Clustering in VMware Ever wonder if you could try playing with clustering, but without all the expense? Well you are in luck. It is pretty simple to do.