Working with Terraform to build VM’s in Azure for proof-of-concept work, I often opt to use Ubuntu for my Linux systems. Up until 18.04 everything worked fine but when I tried to go to 20.04 or later my Terraform deployment would error out with: Failure sending request: StatusCode=404 — Original Error: Code="PlatformImageNotFound" Message="The platform image […]

Let me start by saying, I really love Microsoft Azure and my brain is currently flooded with plenty of Azure goodness after earning my Azure Admin certification. Therefore I was surprised to find myself working on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform less than a week after passing the AZ-104. I find that my professional […]

The current state of the world has caused some unique stresses on IT infrastructure. For IT departments servicing internal teams, remote access infrastructure in particular has felt the brunt of the blow. To that end, I spent a couple of weeks testing out enterprise VPN solutions.

If you use linux and have never come across this statement (or just realized this in the course of working with the OS), then let me be the first to tell you this critical truth… “Everything is a bloody file.” While this holistic statement isn’t quite 100% true, it’s close enough that if you adopt […]

If you run linux desktops (virtual, containerized, physical… or other?) then you may have come across the term VNC which is shorthand for “Virtual Network Computing” which is so ambiguous it means practically nothing. If you come from the windows world you are probably familiar with the term RDP which is shorthand for “Remote Desktop […]

Let’s Encrypt is an incredible, FREE, service that allows you to get trusted SSL certificates for your website. The certs expire every 90-days but what is great is that there are a lot of tools for auto-renewing the certificate without you ever having to touch anything on your server… until that process breaks. Case-in-point: If […]

I haven’t posted in ages due to being generally slammed with work but this little piece I threw together was too good to forget about so I wanted to put it down. If you work with a larger owncloud deployment and have a lot of users and allow file sharing, you may be curious to […]

I have decided to give Ubuntu 17.04 LTS Desktop a go. On a whim I installed it on a laptop I had lying about (being an IT person they tend to proliferate over a given period of time in my office… older units becoming doorstops, newer units lovely “Jenga” blocks and maybe the occasional Proxmox […]

This lovely item came across my feed today and I realized there is so much that I do poorly when it comes to shell scripting it is absurd 🙁 https://dev.to/thiht/shell-scripts-matter Anyhow I am extremely thankful for this long and detailed post and wanted to pass it along to my readership. I also wanted to crowd-source […]

A little over six months ago I started researching the quickly emerging world of “Hyper-converged” infrastructure as a new IT ethos to take my company’s IT operations into the next decade of application and data hosting. I was first introduced to the idea when I attended a webinar from Simplivity, one of the leading companies […]

I have written articles on how to start using RealmD and SSSD for integrating ubuntu into a windows network. However, prior to that I wrote an article on using PBIS. RealmD and SSSD is, by far, the superior method IMHO and experience, so for all of those folks that want to switch, you probably want […]

A lot of my bash scripting experience has been, in one sense, relatively simple. I have several scripts that span several hundred lines and do fairly complex things across multiple systems. From that perspective they aren’t necessarily simple. However it wasn’t until recently that I had to really starting thinking about managing when scripts run […]

I am working on a project where I need to generate a random value and assign it to a variable… Initially I was doing this: var=$(date +%s | sha512sum | base64 | head -c 12 ; echo) Which was okay until I started executing my script more than once in a short period of time. […]

This is going to be very short and sweet as it is primarily just a note to self. I stuggled with getting outbound mail delivery working for some time and finally got it all figured out. Using Exim4 for mail sending I did the following: