The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category

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Windows Firewall: Block rules take precedence over Allow rules

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/07

Reminder to self for Windows Firewall: Block rules take precedence over Allow rules (see * below as actually it is even more complex); [WayBack] Firewall Rule Properties Page: General Tab has

Firewall rules are evaluated in the following order:

  1. Allow if secure with Override block rules selected in the Customize Allow if Secure Settings dialog box.
  2. Block the connection.
  3. Allow the connection.
  4. Default profile behavior (allow or block as specified on the applicable Profile tab of the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security Properties dialog box).

Within each category, rules are evaluated from the most specific to the least specific. A rule that specifies four criteria is selected over a rule that specifies only three criteria.

Which means that this will block TCP port 1024 traffic to bar.exe:

The Block rules are inserted by Windows if you click “Cancel” on a dialog like this (note the lowercase path, despite the application being at C:\Program Files (x86)\Foo\Bar.exe):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Firewall, Infrastructure, Power User, Windows | 1 Comment »

Limits on Everything – The Isoblog.

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/01

Via [WayBack] Limits on Everything – The Isoblog.:

A posting at Brave New Geek about limits on everything, for example limits on message sizes and numbers of in-flight messages in message queues. Interesting read.

Very interesting read indeed: [WayBack] Take It to the Limit: Considerations for Building Reliable Systems – Brave New Geek

You have to set limits, which begs for a few questions:

  1. how to find out which limits and at what levels
  2. how to enforce these limits

Food for thought…

The first can be done with benchmarking, see for instance these from the same blogs above:

Enforcing limits depends in your infrastructure and your communication stacks.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Development, Infrastructure, Opinions, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Home – Outpan – GTIN to product attribute mapping

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/04/26

On my research list: Home – Outpan as it is a key-value store of EAN (actually GTIN, so including GS1 UPC, EAN which means barcodes like UPC-12, EAN-8, EAN-13 and ITF-14).

  • [WayBack] Global Trade Item Number – Wikipedia
  • [WayBack] API Documentation – Outpan Developers

    Legacy API

    Get Product Information

    GET https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/[GTIN]?apikey=[YOUR API KEY]

    Add Product Name

    POST https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/[GTIN]/name?apikey=[YOUR API KEY]

    Required POST parameters:

    name: The name you would like to add for this product.

    Add Product Attribute

    POST https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/[GTIN]/attribute?apikey=[YOUR API KEY]

    Required POST parameters:

    name: Name of the attribute you would like to add for this product.

    value: Value for the attribute you would like to add for this product.

    • [GTIN] is the barcode number (ISBN, EAN, UPC, …) of the product you’re looking up.
    • All API calls must be done via HTTPS. Plain HTTP calls will be rejected.

–jeroen

via [WayBack] [How To] Scan a barcode and add the product name to Wunderlist : tasker

[How To] Scan a barcode and add the product name to Wunderlist
byu/plepleus intasker

 

Posted in Barcode, Cloud, Cloud Apps, Cloud Development, Development, EAN, Infrastructure, Internet, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Doing hardware upgrades, infrastructure rearrangements and software updates over this week. Expect some down-time…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/04/16

This is upgrade/update week, so new disk space, and quite a bit of reorganisation going on.

Expect down-times in various portions of infrastatus.wiert.me

Secondaries should catch most, but some of the web-sites will be down for a while.

–jeroen

Posted in DevOps, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

From the #AllesIstKaput department: DNS 1.1.1.1 is unusable for many; 9.9.9.9 has government affiliation

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/04/04

Abstract from this morning’s Twitter feed:

  • 1.1.1.1 [Wayback] DNS is broken in many areas (because of for instance AT&T, Vodafone, Cisco screwing up and 1.1.1.1 historically being marked for research purposes)
  • 9.9.9.9 [Wayback] DNS has government affiliation (owned by Quad9, but the partner list below does not look nice)

So what’s left?

There are a more interesting IPv4 addresses untaken for DNS, but I’m not sure they are likable enough:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Cloudflare, DNS, Infrastructure, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Sometimes clouds vaporise: the Docker Cloud shuts down in ~8 weeks.

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/26

From [WayBack] Docker – Docker Cloud Migration Notification and FAQs:

The services on Docker Cloud that provide application, node, and swarm cluster management will be shutting down on May 21.

…

If you do not migrate by May 21, your applications running on the Docker node cluster management service will cease to operate.

Swarms will continue to function; however, if you do not retrieve your SSH keys for the Swarms being managed by our swarm cluster management service, you will be unable to access your swarms using your Docker ID. For instructions on how to retrieve and access your Swarms with SSH keys, please refer to the Docker docs.

So soon, no more [WayBack] Docker Cloud – Build, Ship and Run any App, Anywhere.

Remember: still the cloud is other peoples computers, so be sure you can move when needed.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Development, Containers, Development, Docker, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

EmbarcaderoMonitoring – monitoring the Embarcadero internet related services

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/15

Over time, there are lots of complaints about Embarcadero related internet services (like forums, QC, Appanalytics, docwiki, blogs, web site, maintenance, …) so to track uptime, I’ve created a set of EmbarcaderoMonitoring pages:

This is preliminary work based on my own lists of Embarcadero endpoints combined with some research like [WayBack] dnsdumpster embarcadero.com.png and [WayBack] IdentIPSpy

Underneath, they run on the uptimerobot.com infrastructure which has a limit of 50 free monitors.

It means I have to:

  • trim this down for relevancy
  • better document the endpoint
  • find correct endpoint targets for the black (disabled) and red (down) entries as a few of them might need tweaking
  • maybe split off an insecure and secure version (now most subdomains have both http and https monitored)

Any ideas on improving this are welcome: please post a comment here on on the resulting G+ thread.

Note it likely won’t show cases like when the website was hacked or TLS certificate issues like in SSLLabs security reports for some embarcadero subdomains. I need to think about a means for those, as it will certainly help monitoring my own infrastructure in a similar way.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Cloud, Development, DevOps, Infrastructure, Monitoring, Power User, Software Development, Uptimerobot | Leave a Comment »

Scott Hanselman on Witter: “Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/08

An important question for many people, so if you want to know more or get started: [WayBack] Scott Hanselman on Twitter: “Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration?” followed by:

Yes, AKS is Azure Container Services (go figure!).

Notes

  • For burning, Scott recommends [WayBack] Etcher: Burn images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily (which is now also available as experimental [WayBack] Etcher CLI), I tended to use a script like below since I’m a command-line person, but since Etcher does write and verify in one run, I’m considering switching:
    1. find where the SD card is mounted on your Mac: diskutil list
    2. sudo su -
    3. execute this from the directory where you downloaded filling in targetDevice with the value from diskutil list

    targetDevice="disk9"
    imageName="2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch-lite"
    unzip -o ${imageName}.zip
    diskutil umount "/dev/${targetDevice}s1"; \
    dd bs=1m of="/dev/r${targetDevice}" if=${imageName}; \
    sync; \
    diskutil list; \
    diskutil eject "/dev/${targetDevice}"

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Docker, Infrastructure, Kubernetes (k8n), Power User | Leave a Comment »

Happy “check your backups day”; does your restore process work? And how is the rest of your admin process doing?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/01

Today is [WayBack] Check your backups Day! started by @CyberShambles in dedication of the @Gitlab outage on 20170201.

Please check your restoration process now. As people screw up and accidents happen (I know first hand from a client).

Why isn’t this date on January 31st? Long short story: the failure started that date, but restoration took most of 20170201. So February 1st it is.

Others will follow and GitLab wasn’t alone, as a few days before soup.io had to restore a 2015 database backup.

It all comes back to

Nobody wants backup.

Everybody wants restore.

which made it to the 2008 [WayBack] adminzen.org – The Admin Zen and has been attributed to various people including [WayBack] to Kristian Köhntopp and [WayBack] to Martin Seeger who told Kristian Köhntopp that it was coined by Sun’s Michael Nagorsnik at one of the early [WayBack] NuBIT. Martin was there; he knows (:

The oldest mention of the phrase I could find was in 2006 by Volker Bir at [WayBack] Spy Sheriff – so how do people get infected w/ this thing?.

Keeping clients in the loop

Since soup.io hosts their updates blog on their own platform, the restore resulted in the post prior to [Archive.is] Update after crash ;) – Soup Updates sort of ironically being the mid-2015 [WayBack] Give us your money! – Soup Updates. Usually dogfooding is a good thing though.

During such a downtime, it is crucial to stay in touch through alternative channels. Soup.io didn’t do a good job on their twitter account: they only announced the “update after crash”, not being down, why or progress.

They also deny the WayBack machine access to updates.soup.io because of [WayBack] robots.txt because how they redirect through /remotes, but luckily Archive.is doesn’t care about that and has less old updates.soup.io archived as recent as end of 2015.

GitLab did a much better job on their GitLabStatus account.

Postmortems and organisation culture.

Everybody can screw up, and usually a severe outage happens even when everybody tries to do the right thing. The only way to learn from it is to have [WayBack] Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture – Code as Craft.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in DevOps, Power User | Leave a Comment »

What happens when a huge number of people share a single grocery store loyalty card? – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/12

[WayBack] What happens when a huge number of people share a single grocery store loyalty card? – The Old New Thing

An interesting discussion in the comments besides this interesting article observation:

What messes up their data analysis is when two people with different lifestyles swap cards. The system sees that somebody who used to buy yogurt and bulk brewer’s yeast is now buying potato chips and frozen pizzas, and it can’t figure out what is going on.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Development, Fun, Infrastructure, LifeHacker, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

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