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Category Archives: Technology

Things Technological

Cross-Account use of AWS CLI

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

The documentation around using the AWS CLI from an AWS EC2 instance on one account to access resources in another account are not great. The information is all there, somewhere, but it’s scattered across many places and to derive what you need from those sources you have to pretty well read all the sources. Two […]

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Oh no! The certificate has expired!

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Hey kids! You know those SSL certificates you obtained and installed today? Yeah, put a reminder in your calendar right now for a week before the expiry date, so you don’t get caught out. Future you will thank you.

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OpenSSL on HighSierra

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Recently I finally got around to reading the excellent OpenSSL Cookbook from Ivan Risti? – you can grab a free copy via https://www.openssl.org/docs/ – and the first question in my mind was “what version of OpenSSL is already installed on my Mac”. A quick check showed it’s there pre-built in HighSierra in /usr/bin:

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TLS 1.3 – It’s like Christmas

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Via The Register I see that TLS 1.3 has finally rolled off the standards and committee draft assembly line. This is pretty big news, not least because we’ve been working with the current TLS 1.2 standard for almost a decade, and the defects in it have well and truly been discovered and exploited.

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Bootstrapping AWS with Terraform and CodeCommit

Friday, October 6, 2017

A rough model that I’ve been working on and thinking about recently is for the AWS account (or accounts) be put together so that there’s a “bastion” or “bootstrap” instance that can be used to build out the rest of the environment. There is a certain chicken-and-egg around this, particularly if you want to use […]

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Creating a custom Kylo Sandbox

Monday, September 4, 2017

I had a need – or desire – to build a VM with a certain version of NiFi on it, and a handful of other Hadoop-type services, to act as a local sandbox. As I’ve mentioned before, I do find it slightly more convenient to use a single VM for a collection of services, rather […]

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Smoke testing Kafka in HDP

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Assuming that you have a vanilla HDP, or the HDP sandbox, or have installed a cluster with Ambari and added Kafka, then the following may help you to smoke test the behaviour of Kafka. Obviously if you’ve configured Kafka or Zookeeper to be running on different ports, this isn’t going to help you much, and […]

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Lies, Damned Lies and Programmers

Monday, August 21, 2017

I recently came across a really nice set – not directly related – of articles dealing with various profound errors that programmers and system designers fall into when dealing with names and addresses. The TL;DR if you don’t read these: names and addresses are hard and most things you believe about them are wrong. Let’s […]

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A Demonstration NiFi Cluster

Monday, July 3, 2017

In order to explore NiFi clustering, and NiFi site-to-site protocol, I decided that I could use a minimal installation – as I’m really just exploring the behaviour of NiFi itself, I don’t need to have any Hadoop environment running as well. To this end, my thought was that I could get the flexibility to just […]

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List-o-mania

Saturday, June 17, 2017

I have, once again, felt stuck, spinning my wheels in the mud. There is an unpleasant, and possibly vicious, cycle at play here in my head: my planning falls apart, I feel like I am not getting anything done, my anxiety spikes, I cannot plan cogently. Repeat and repeat and repeat like some damned overwrought […]

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