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Problem I would like to use web deploy to IIS Site running on a different server. However when I try to deploy from Visual Studio(VS) 2010 using that users credentials, I get the below error. Error 36 Web deployment task failed.(Remote agent (URL https://server:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=site.name.com) could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target…

Problem I needed to created topics in Amazon Web Services(AWS) Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka(MSK) and I wanted to list out the topics after they were created to verify. Solution This solution is written in python using the confluent-kafka package. It connects to the Kafka cluster and adds the new topics. Then it prints out all of the topics for verification This file contains…

Problem You have many C4 PlantUML diagrams in nested folders that you would like to render without having to run the PlantUML cli on each one. Solution Ensure that your prerequisites are met Install PlantUML on Mac This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden…

Problem You would like to create PlantUML diagrams on your Mac but don’t have the prerequisites or cli installed. Solution Steps Install java with brew install java Install PlantUML with brew install plantuml Output for Java Your output will look like the below if it is a new installation This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than…

Problem I was trying to create an Elastic Container Service(ECS) service on an ECS cluster that used EC2 instances in AWS. However the tasks would fail to deploy with the following cryptic error. service my-service was unable to place a task because no container instance met all of its requirements. The closest matching container-instance 1234a5b6cd7890e2f34gh5678i8jk is missing an attribute…

Problem You want to know all of the applications that your team supports across environments. You are working with an api and it gives you a distinct list of all the apps across all environments. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode…

Problem You need to grant permissions to secret paths in a uniform way for multiple users and/or roles. You may even need to explain the access to someone working in security or compliance. This becomes much more difficult if you are granting access separately to each user and/or role. Solution Fortunately HashiCorp Vault provides a policy. With a policy, you can define a set of paths and…

Problem Depending on your CI/CD story for terraform and the sensitivity of your environments, you may need to apply terraform changes manually. The challenge that can happen is that changes in terraform may not be applied. This creates a challenge when you do try to apply a change but see historic changes as well that were never applied. Solution The first step is to understand what changes…

Problems Like many engineers, I have a support shift. When doing so, much of the work is based around tickets. At the same time, it’s very useful to understand what changes are made for each ticket. This helps for future reference and knowledge sharing as well as understanding changes made if anything goes sideways. The question is how to do this without making it add to the burden of…

Problem While trying to use pipenv to manage python dependencies, I noticed that I got the following error when trying to convert the Pipfile.lock to a requirements.txt file. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about…

Problem Hashicorp Terraform provides a cli with the command terraform fmt which will format terraform files according to the canonical style. This is a great tool. The challenge is that you don’t want to give yourself or team members one more thing they need to remember to do. It would be ideal to integrate it into the Continuous Integration(CI) system so it would always be run but no one would…

Problem You try to start your mongo db service and get an error like the following This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters my-user@my-server:~$ sudo systemctl status…

Problem You need to mount a network drive onto your Linux server and you have a previously established pipeline using Chef and Ruby. There needs to be a way to do this in a straight forward, repeatable and way that is easy to debug. Solution This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an…

HA Proxy Multiple Sockets

Problem You are leveraging HA Proxy and need to monitor it closely to ensure good performance for your site or service. In most cases, this will mean monitoring. In my case, I leveraged telegraf and sensu for monitoring the socket. However I ran into permission problems trying to have both sensu and telegraf use the same user/group to read the stats. I got the below error. This file contains…

FireEye Agent Unattended Install

Problem Need to install the FireEye Agent version 34.28.1 on Windows in a simple and unattended manner. Solution Assuming your msi and configuration file are both in C:\temp then you can run msiexec C:\temp\xagtSetup_34.28.1_universal.msi /qn /quiet /norestart INSTALLSERVICE=1 CONFJSONDIR=C:\temp References StackOverflow: Silent installation of a MSI packageSilent Install BuilderFireEye…

Chef Foodcritic exit code 3

Problem I was running bundle exec foodcritic -f correctness and it was returning an exit code of 3. This causes builds to fail, like mine in TeamCity. FC007: Ensure recipe dependencies are reflected in cookbook metadata: cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/backup.rb:1 I had the following line referencing a recipe in the same cookbook include_recipe 'firewall' Solution The solution was to fully…

Removing Double Quotes from Token

Problem You’re authenticating with an api and receiving a token that you need to use for subsequent calls. However the issue is that there are double quotes around response of your token. Without removing the double quotes, the future calls will fail due to an invalid token. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To…