Posts

This is a quick post to share a useful KQL query for Azure Firewalls that I’ve been using. It’s based on the default Firewall query from Microsoft, but with some added variables to allow for a more focused analysis of source and destination traffic. I’m putting it here for my future reference and in case it’s helpful for anyone else. Azure Firewall Query with Variables This query allows you to analyze Azure Firewall logs, focusing on specific source and destination IP addresses within a defined time range. It’s particularly useful for troubleshooting and security analysis. ...

This is a quick post collating some of the notes for KQL queries for Azure Virtual Desktop I have in various documents into a single place, just in case they are helpful for anyone and also for my reference, 👋 hello future Russ. Find out all the IP addresses in the last 30 days This query looks at the past 30 days, counting connections by username and client IP address, then sorts these counts in descending order, adds geolocation data for each IP, and finally outputs the client IP, connection count, and location details (country, state, and city) to provide insights into connection patterns and frequencies across different users and locations in the Windows Virtual Desktop environment. ...

Back in May 2020 I published what would be one of the more popular posts on this blog Azure DevOps Ansible Pipeline, it covered the Azure DevOps pipeline I had settled upon for running my Ansible playbooks which built and interacted with workloads running in Microsoft Azure. Fast forward four years, I updated the pipeline for Chapter 15 of the second edition of Learn Ansible↗ ; this version of the pipeline, which is covered in detail in the book, can be found in the repo linked below; ...

It looks like I have written about the tools I use day-to-day since 2017; I wonder how much has changed. 🤔 Info ...

I have been reading a lot about CrewAI recently and as it was a long weekend I decided to tip my toe in the water and do something with it, but what? About a year ago, while bored, I added a Python script to this blog which used the OpenAI API to write a blog post based on what I had listened to the previous week using data from Last.FM↗ . ...

Exciting News! I’m thrilled to announce that the 2nd edition of my book, “Learn Ansible: Automate your cloud infrastructure, security configuration, and application deployment using Ansible” is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Packt Publishing’s website! 📣 🎉 📚 Amazon ( 🇺🇸 ) Amazon ( 🇬🇧 ) Packt Publishing ( 🌍 ) Whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate user looking to take your Ansible skills to the next level, this hands-on guide will empower you to automate your infrastructure and application deployments consistently and efficiently. 💻 🚀 ...

Just a quick post this week, following on from my last post last week about using Conda and also the one from a few weeks about about running LLMs locally using ollama I decided to explore the world of AI image generation on my local macOS machine. To do this I thought I would revisit a tool I dabbled with about a year ago called InvokeAI↗ , the tool is described as follows: ...

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently finished writing the second edition of Learn Ansible. This had me using Python a lot, and my one key takeaway is that managing Python has become a massive chore. Now, with the book complete, I thought I would strip back on my machine, start from scratch - or as close to clean as I could get - and develop a cleaner, more streamlined way of managing Python on my local machine. ...