Tools 🧰

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

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer↗ locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/↗ : Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project↗ has been announced, developed and then released. The project describes itself as follows: ...

In my last blog post I introduced a stage which executed Checkov↗ to my Terraform Azure DevOps pipeline, this scanned the Terraform configuration and stopped the deployment if there was an issue. I also added a stage which checks to see if there are any resources being destroyed. Whats missing? Both of these I thought should give some basic protection against problems caused by common configuration issues, which they did, but it didn’t take into account the end user, i.e. me, making a change which would dramatically increase the running costs of the deployment. ...

As I am finding myself using Microsoft Azure more and more I thought I would make some notes about how to quickly access the various web portals. The Azure Portal A lot of the time I use the standard http://portal.azure.com/↗ URL, but as I started having to jump around various accounts for work and also personal use, I discovered that there were some great short cuts you can use. The quickest of these I have been using to navigate the main Azure portal is appending the primary domain of the tenant you want to access to the end of the URL, for example http://portal.azure.com/myadtenant.onmicrosoft.com↗ ; ...

Over the last six months the Docker Store, which was first introduced as a private beta nearly a year and a half ago in June 2016, has come on leaps and bounds. It has quickly, but without much fanfare, become a one stop shop for all things Docker, with the both the documentation and home pages linking back to content now hosted on the store. So what is the Docker Store? In short, it is a market place for containers, plugins and also Docker itself there is a mixture of free and also paid content from both Docker themselves as well as third part providers. ...

Its been quite a while since I wrote up what I am using on day to day, in fact I seem to have skipped all of 2016. Desktop Apps Not too much change on the Desktop … Visual Studio Code↗ ; I started off the year Atom, but this gives me the same functionality and seems quicker Pastebot↗ ; Working in tech means I copy and paste alot, this lets me sync and (not all from StackOverflow↗ ) Bear↗ ; For note taking … still using SublimeText↗ (Still the best text editor around), 1Password↗ , Photoshop↗ , Omnigraffle↗ , Tweetbot↗ & MS Office↗ . ...

I thought it was about time, as I had some to spare today, to have a play with one of the new feature of the Elastic family of products I have yet to try. Beats is the platform for single-purpose data shippers. They install as lightweight agents and send data from hundreds or thousands of machines to Logstash or Elasticsearch. I have used an ELK stack before↗ but never for metrics, it always been for more traditional log files and tools such as Zabbix↗ have been my goto for metrics. ...

Part of my daily routine is to go through Reddit, RSS feeds and also wading through the MediaGlasses twitter↗ account where I follow loads of technical people & companies. Over the lat week or so I have seen Portainer mentioned quite a lot, particularly since it has now had over 1M + pulls on the Docker Hub; Looks like Santa left @portainerio a nice christmas gift.. 1 Million @docker Pulls!!! Thank you all for helping us achieve this milestone. pic.twitter.com/tey47Hhkwo ...