We use both Puppet and AWS extensively. Historically, we’ve managed secrets with eyaml and git. This allows version control and recovery of secrets, but requires the decryption key(s) to be stored on the same disk as the secrets. We’ve evaluated Hashicorp’s Vault as a secrets management solution. While it is robust and full of appealing […]
I don’t travel for work much, but I travel enough that I need a semi-portable computer. For the last three years, I’ve lugged around a Dell Precision M6800. I’ve always found Precisions to be great laptops with exceptional Linux support. These are one of the few laptops that can still disable Optimus and run entirely […]
If you’re not running Amazon Linux with the built in network interface management tools, adding multiple ENIs on the same subnet can be a confusing experience. We use this sometimes to run multiple elastic IPs on separate network interfaces so we can bind to them separately. We worked through this with Amazon support recently and […]
We have a client that keeps encountering a tremendous load on their WordPress Mysql database despite a trivial amount of normal traffic on their blog and lots of tuning that eliminated most normal database access. We tracked this down to the AdRotate plugin, and specifically the tracking callbacks to the admin-ajax interface in WordPress. Each […]
If you use EC2 instances for tasks that only need to be performed during work hours, it can be challenging and annoying to manually start up and shutdown instances when you need them. There are services that can handle this for you (Skeddly, Ylastic, etc) but they cost money and are overkill for small companies […]
