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Quickly Learn Linux – Databases and MySQL

Quickly Learn Linux – Databases and MySQL

Quick Overview on Databases and MySQL This post focuses on MySQL installation and configuration. So you can deploy and configure a stand alone instance with this quick guide or continue on and use this database with the MediaWiki deployment. This is a good guide as an introduction to Linux systems and the command line. This is not meant for professionals or experienced admins but more for people looking to start dipping their toes into system administration and engineering. MySQL is…

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Virtualbox Icon
Quickly learn Linux – Virtualbox Linux

Quickly learn Linux – Virtualbox Linux

Virtualbox Linux I’ve been using VirtualBox for quite a while, especially for Linux servers (what I mean by Virtualbox linux). It’s generally the first hypervisor I’d recommend running on windows as a test environment. It’s not the best performance wise, but I hope you’re not looking for performance out of something like this anyways. This is just a tool to test things out with quickly and easily. I always recommend it to beginners as a quick simple way to learn…

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Quickly Learn Linux – Mediawiki Deployment

Quickly Learn Linux – Mediawiki Deployment

I like to throw this at fresh grads and interns coming on as software/systems/support engineers. It’s a good task to get your feet wet with Linux and learn a few basics. It’s a very simple full stack application to deploy. Php is widely used as is MySQL. For my quick tutorials I chose to go with MySQL 5.6, Apache(httpd), and Php. MediaWiki Deployment Overview Deploying Mediawiki involves the following Install and configure MySQL for MediaWiki Install and configure Php Install…

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Ansible
Ansible – digging into details

Ansible – digging into details

There’s a ton of craze about Ansible. It has been the fastest growing CM tool for the last couple of years and it’s not going away anytime soon. There are lots of things to like and a few things not to like about it. This will be a bit of a continuation of this post. Why the huge growth in Ansible There’s been a ton of growth because the barrier to entry is the lowest. I’m not talking down about…

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Configuration Management tools
Configuration Management – Salt, Puppet, Ansible, Chef

Configuration Management – Salt, Puppet, Ansible, Chef

I’ve gone through quite a few configuration management tools and have come away with a few lessons learned. I often see posts asking about configuration tools and I thought I’d write a quick outline since there aren’t enough blog posts on configuration management already /s. I’m only going to focus on the big 4 in this space; Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt. Chef is the one I’ve least used, so if anyone has any corrections please let me know. Configuration…

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Terraform VPC
Terraform for Highly Available WordPress

Terraform for Highly Available WordPress

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Someone complained about the lack of technical details hereso I’m going to dig into Terraform a bit. Network I’ve been using a basic template for most of my VPC configurations. This guy just sets up the VPC, route table (very basic here), and subnets. Just a simple VPC with subnets in zone A and zone B for all resources. EFS EFS I configure with a mount in each zone as well. I manually built the AMI I ended up using…

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Highly Available WordPress on AWS

Highly Available WordPress on AWS

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Highly Available WordPress instance I have a few wordpress sites and I currently have them deployed in docker containers on a single host. I’m going to move these to AWS, migrate my data, test, and then switch DNS. This is a followup to this initial post and this page outlines the migration and Highly Available configuration in AWS. Tools used I want to keep everything simple so I’m going with terraform and userdata files to setup the environment and AMI…

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Highly Available Wordpress in AWS
Highly Available WordPress on AWS – Intro

Highly Available WordPress on AWS – Intro

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I’ve had a few friends ask me to look into their WordPress instances for some redundancy and performance improvements. Specifically they want a highly available wordpress which can auto-scale. Lots of people install the whole stack on a single instance and then ignore it for a while. Some use WordPress on AWS but only utilize EC2. Once performance starts to degrade they typically migrate to a larger server. This process will repeat until the costs skyrocket. Not only that, but…

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Ansible – Running from Message Queue

Ansible – Running from Message Queue

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Programmatically running Ansible It’s really easy to run Ansible programmatically. I use Python to access the Ansible APIs and run playbooks. It’s also possible to use a templating engine like Jinja2 to build playbooks but that’s for another blog post later. Check out servers for hackers on how to hook into Ansible’s API. Very simple and straight forward, I built a reusable component for myself based on this. Message Queue So far I’ve used ActiveMQ and Amazon SQS. SQS has…

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AWS CentOS 7 FIPS mode

AWS CentOS 7 FIPS mode

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DO NOT USE CENTOS FOR FEDRAMP This probably took me entirely too long to figure out so I figured I’d make a post on it to help anyone else trying to enable FIPS in AWS on CentOS boxes. FIPS mode If you’re trying to get FedRAMP certification this is something you’re going to need. FIPS 140-2 validated/compliant encryption is necessary for FedRAMP. If you don’t have FIPS 140-2 you will end up with high-findings on your SAR and a no-go…

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