I haven’t installed an ELK stack since CentOS 7 came out, all of the components which go to make up the stack have been updated quite bit since then so I decided to have a go at installing the stack on a clean CentOS 7 installation. ELK? ELK is a term used for a combination of three Open Source products from Elastic↗ ; Elasticsearch↗ — Search & Analyze Data in Real Time Logstash↗ — Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data Kibana↗ — Explore & Visualize Your Data All three products can be used independently, but when they are used together you find yourself with both a powerful and scaleable central logging service. ...

I spent Wednesday out of the office at the 2015 AWS Summit in London. It was the first time I had been to a full on AWS event and I must say I was impressed by the scale (pun intended). The main keynote was interesting, and it was great to hear all about new Elastic File System↗ which is going to be a godsend for those who need to have some level of shared storage. ...

As everyone who knows me will already know, I am a little bit opinionated when it comes to music. However, I haven’t really had a decent sound system for quite a few years. I decided mid last year that I would do something about it and not only start getting back into vinyl (I know, such a hipster) but also get a decent sound system, so started saving. For quite a while I was looking an all-in-one system like the Teac LP-P1000↗ however, I decided I would end up painting myself into a corner with it as I would be only be able to use it in one room, I then started looking at other options. ...

One of the first things I do on a new server is install fail2ban↗ . I have written about it before, but that was back when I was still using CentOS 6. Now I am using CentOS 7 the installation has a few more steps. Firstly, as EPEL is not enabled by standard on most CentOS 7 installations enable the repo and then install fail2ban. Fail2Ban on CentOS 7 1/8 yum install -y epel-release && yum install -y fail2ban Once installed you can run the following to setup a check and block for failed SSH logins (it bans for 24 hours after three login failures); ...

As you may have noticed, the blog looks different (again). This is because I have moved from Wordpress↗ back to Ghost↗ using their GhostPro↗ offering. One of the things I like about Ghost is the default theme, Casper↗ . While I wanted to keep it there were a few things I wanted to tweak, such as removing the full page header image on main index. When I have previously used Ghost I have forked the theme on GitHub and then manually messed about getting any updates from the original code in. ...

Since I last properly [wrote about Docker](/2014/08/31/docker-fig-nginx-reverse-proxies-and-centos-7/“Docker, Fig, NGINX Reverse Proxies and CentOS 7”) a lot has changed. Docker have introduced some new command line tools which allow for easy orchestration of Docker instances, clusters and container management. These are; Docker Machine↗ — Allows you to easily deploy Docker instances to a lot of different platforms. Docker Compose↗ — A replacement for Fig↗ . Docker Swarm↗ — Native clustering for your Docker instances. Out of these three technologies, Swarm is not really suitable for production use so I won’t go into it in too much detail in this post. ...

It has just dawned on me, I have been using the “Aqua Blue” variation of wallpapers which stated shiping with MacOS X since I got my first iMac G3 in 2001. There have been a few variations of it, however the one I have settled on is the one with came with MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. It has been the first thing I have installed on every Mac, Linux and even Windows machine I have run since 2005. ...

According to my LastFM profile↗ I have been listening to the following a lot this month … David Bowie — Nothing Has Changed↗ The Smashing Pumpkins — Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness↗ New Order — Get Ready↗ The War on Drugs — Lost In The Dream↗ Amplifier — The Octopus↗ Flying Colors — Flying Colors↗ Depeche Mode — Songs of Fair and Devotion↗ Suede — Dog Man Star↗ The Stone Roses — Second Coming↗ Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin IV↗