Technology Short Take #76
Published on 19 Jan 2017 · Filed in Information · 1000 words (estimated 5 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #76, the first Technology Short Take of 2017. Normally, I’d publish this on a Friday, but due to extenuating circumstances (my mother-in-law’s funeral is tomorrow) I’m posting it today. Here’s hoping you find something useful!
Networking
- As of Vagrant 1.9.1, the Cumulus plugin for Vagrant is no longer needed. See this post for more details.
- Ivan Pepelnjak (one of my absolutely favorite folks in the IT industry) has a great post on using regex filters in Ansible to parse text printouts from network devices. This is a super-practical post that anyone working with network automation can put to use right away.
- Craig Matsumoto has an informative article on why machine learning is hard to apply to networking. I’ve heard David Meyer—who is quoted extensively in the article—speak several times, and most of the time his stuff is way beyond my understanding. At least now, though, I get the general direction he’s heading.
- Interested in using OVS with VXLAN on Hyper-V, but without OpenStack? This article by Alin Serdean from Cloudbase Solutions describes how it’s done.
- Here’s an article describing how to establish a site-to-site VPN between a Cisco ASA and Microsoft Azure. Anecdotally, I’ve also heard that it works for establishing a VPN between NSX and Azure.
- Major Hayden has a post describing an issue with systemd-networkd (for configuring networking) in systemd 229.
Servers/Hardware
- I mentioned in a tweet a few weeks ago that I ordered my new corporate laptop, a Dell Latitude E7370 (which will run Ubuntu 16.04). Stay tuned for a quick review of the hardware once it arrives.
Security
- Andrew Langhorn discusses some aspects of limiting your attack surface when running workloads on AWS.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Out of the cloud(s) and into the fog. Interesting. (Hat tip to Kelsey Hightower for pointing this out on Twitter.)
- Luke Youngblood has a three-part series (so far) on immutable infrastructure with AWS and Ansible (part 1, part 2, and part 3). These are some really good articles with useful information on using Ansible to create/destroy AWS resources. I’m not new to this topic but still found some useful information here.
- Tomas Fojta shares a script to reboot all hosts in vCloud Director, but to do so in a way that minimizes the impact to users/customers/tenants.
- Rowan Udell has a quick AWS CLI command that prints an ordered list of all the resources in a CloudFormation stack. Although Rowan doesn’t specifically mention it, this command relies on tools like
tr,sort, anduniq, so I’m guessing it will only work on OS X/Linux/*BSD systems. - Stephane Graber has an article explaining how to run Kubernetes in LXD. He also has a nice post detailing the networking functionality in LXD 2.3, which is something I need to explore.
Operating Systems/Applications
- It’s probably confirmation bias, but now that I’ve decided to step up my efforts to migrate from OS X to Linux (see this post) I noticed this post by Nicolas about moving from OS X to Ubuntu. The post has a nice list of Linux replacements for popular OS X apps.
- If you’ve heard all this hubbub about containers but still aren’t really sure what’s going on, this post by Eric Chiang on containers from scratch will do a great job of explaining the underlying OS mechanisms that make containers possible (on Linux, at least).
- Rafael Benevides has a list of 10 things to avoid in Docker containers.
- Docker took a bit of a hit in a couple articles (perhaps more, but these were the ones that bubbled up for me) recently. First up is “The HFT Guy” with a post on a “history of failure” with Docker in production. Then we have a post by David Pollak that outlines his position, which is that Docker is not ready for prime-time.
- As a counterpoint to the “Docker isn’t ready” articles from the previous bullet, consider this article. The author (Pat Robinson, I’m guessing from the URL) shares some viewpoints on why Docker is ready for production for his use case. (Hat tip to John Troyer for a pointer to this article.)
- Cody Bunch has this nice tip on enabling/disabling OS X Finder tabs.
- This post is a bit older, but still useful, I think. Zhenyun Zhuang and the LinkedIn Engineering time have a post on not letting Linux control groups be uncontrolled. One key takeaway from the article is that control groups (cgroups) don’t reserve memory, so it’s still quite possible for memory contention to occur.
- Trishna Guha has an article on using Docker remotely on Atomic Host (something I struggled with myself).
- Want to get all your data out of Evernote following the revelation that their employees have access to your data? Check this out.
Storage
I don’t have anything this time, but I’ll keep alert for links or articles to include next time.
Virtualization
- Feidhlim O’Leary has a post warning of a potential concern with password expiration on the VCHA user account (this is in the vSphere 6.5 release).
- Simon Sharwood of El Reg has the details on a Windows Server 2016 Hotfix for Update Rollup 1 (how’s that for a mouthful?). Apparently, the rollup introduces issues with live migrations, and the hotfix addresses those issues.
Career/Soft Skills
- I briefly entertained the idea of changing my Twitter handle (finally decided against it, for various reasons), but thought that this article provided by one of my followers (thanks Paul!) might be useful to others.
- Andy Callow has a nice summary of pioneer/settler/town planner (PST) articles and implementations. If you’re a fan of this three-mode model or just want to learn more, have a look at Andy’s article. Andy also references this article by Neil Perkin, which I found very useful as well.
OK, that’s it for this time around. I have a ton more content I’d love to include, but this post is already packed to the gills as it is. I guess I’ll just have to save it for the next one. Until then, enjoy!