RUN TCP/IP | Morgan Lucas is Tech Blogging

Cars have computers now.   Photo by Andrew M on Unsplash  Not mine, mine is about 20 years old. I put a key into the ignition, the CD player keeps eating my alt-pop-rock CDs, it gets me from here to there, and I like it. My next car will be the same, sans CD-eating. But! Other people's cars have computers, and sometimes I have to work on the computer parts.

 It's a blogging platform -- As you know (Well, as you know now ), I have been looking for places to export all of this to another platform, one with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and modern editing capabilities that is actually maintained by its owners. Check it out here on Product Hunt . You use Markdown to write; As someone who is used to the highlighter and change stylistic appearances way of things, it's a bit of a change. I'm not sure I've used markdown more than 4 or 5 times in my career -- 8 times in my life. Grammarly is built in; Technically, they're right. Similarly to Notion, we can type "/" for commands to appear. I can't format text the way I like to. The image may not show up on the final product as I used the hyperlink of the image hosted here. Ideally, this text 'new and SEO improved!' would be directly under the image and smaller, as a caption. Notion can do that.  One thing Notion cannot do that Neptune can (or will be abl...

The course is in 6 sections, so I'll separate them by parts. I do have Windows Server experience, and 2019 is new to me, though the general idea is the same. But first, a short refresher on volumes: Partition table  - Master Boot Record read by BIOS (Old, but still out there. If it works, it works!)  - GUID Partition Table is read by UEFI (New!) Disk Type Basic Disks are divided into partitions (Which you can put different OSes on and boot them - Boot Partitions). Dynamic Disks have volumes (Which can probably do the same thing. These have more flexibility). Has RAID arrays. 📥 File Systems NTFS - Huge maximum volume/file size. Has auditing. FAT - Compatible with everything, but file/volume sizes leave a lot to be desired. ReFS (From Server 2012) - Much the same as NTFS, with less overhead, and find file corruption while remaining online. If you shrink volume size, you're changing the layout to the hard drive. 📥Data Deduplication (Dedup)  - Save space as you store a...

 This is a way to manage your cloud setup and use patch your AWS infrastructure in a way that meets certain parameters. There are multiple operating systems you can choose from; It's the equivalent of saying "Hey, I have a Linux machine here; So search though all of the Linux options only and see if my particular Instance needs a patch." Or "Here's a group of Windows Servers; Check for patches once a week and let me know." If you have multiple instances with multiple instances, you can put those into Patch Groups and designate a OS to each, however, an instance can only be in one AWS Patch Group (PG) at a time. The most challenging part was simply setting things up. I did this in two accounts: In my root account, with the help of this video on YouTube, I simply put in instances, applied patches easily. In an IAM account, I had to have multiple permissions, and even then it took about 2 days for the instances to be acknowledged and for me to have patches atta...

 The cool thing is, I was contracted to make these videos in collaboration with CloudAvail Technology Consulting to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See these links to go to the DataDog and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     CloudWatch     The syntax is odd, but easy to grasp. Sort log data by IP addresses, message codes, and status codes. The simplest query system, but not quite robust.   Insights       The syntax has changed - Vastly. I see major SQL influences. You can see that in how the parse function works - in this case, it's often taken pieces of a pre-existing standard - in this case, message - and breaking them into their own c...

 The nifty thing is, I was contracted to make these videos in collaboration with CloudAvail Technology Consulting to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging and data visualization - CloudWatch, CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See the following links to go to the CloudWatch , CloudWatch Insights , and DataDog posts.   NewRelic   I expected this to be easier than the previous two and it's rather dense in its information at first glance, although you an adjust it to show real-time analytics.  Documentation is reasonable and concise; One could gather the basics of the syntax quickly. Opening a singular log entry and clicking the elements of it to include or exclude from a new query was very helpful. check out the video for how I did error tracking. The GUI is my favorite; Sleek and modern, and yet i...

The nifty thing is, I was contracted to make these videos in collaboration with CloudAvail Technology Consulting to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - CloudWatch, CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See the following links to go to the CloudWatch , CloudWatch Insights , and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     ...There's a lot of information.  And a lot of ways to sort it. What's the difference between Patterns and Transactions? The Live Tail setting is pretty cool. Would be very helpful in making you panic if there was some kind of incident and you got a ton of error logs, but then you can sort by patterns and get a bit more insight into what is failing or being attacked. You can see in my video that I had to ad...

While I'm close to posting my analyses of logging services, take a look at this.  A VM has been attacked multiple times. Check in your Security Alerts panel from the Azure Security Center homepage. Just In Time VM access is enabled. If you're not using a VM, it doesn't have to be up until a service specifically asks for it. Watch the video for more.

 This is me going "Hey, let's open up VS Code and just mess around." Here is the website for this project.   Let's look at what I did !  

 Link here ; It may not be free by the time you see it, but check again in a day or so. You know Udemy, there's always a sale. SEOs have always seemed simple on the surface to me, but somewhat hard to implement. WordPress has tools installed, but Google's Red-Headed Stepchild, Blogger, has been abandoned, with limited improvements, so SEO manipulation is harder. Questions I have: If we're all gunning to get to Google (or Bing's) first page, how effective can these tactics be?  Using the same keywords, how do we stand out? Don't use the same words. See; Head, Body, and Long Tail keywords. Head is likely to be the single, most competitive word. Body involves phrases, and long tail include more descriptive phrases. Have you ever searched something relatively specific (like 'firewalls for CloudFormation JSON code') and gotten fewer results? That's the Long Tail. Tools Mentioned Google (Of course) Keywords Everywhere - Does it work with Bing? (Yes!) What I L...

 Want to share this easily?  Check out the Notion page. By Morgan Lucas (she/her) from this video by Johnny Chivers We use data migration services to, well, migrate data. But why would we want to do this?  Perhaps... We're moving our business to the cloud, and need to shift all of that cold storage we have onsite. We want to use it as a backup in cause our infrastructure is out of commission. We could have information to share with a 3rd party, and instead of giving access to on-site databases, we put it on AWS to share. Nevertheless, let's recap what I've done. Created publicly accessible, password-protected database with Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility to migrate to Amazon Dynamo DB Managed inbound rules of security group to limit access Used open source software HeidiDB to interact with database via a TCP/IP session and specific URL for DB (Not shown here for security)     Connected to Aurora PostgreSQL Database ran queries that deleted and cre...

I am a Nintendo household. I have every console from childhood - Some of the very oldest ones were my father's - except the Virtual Boy. I still have my GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and now the Switch.  When I received the Wii U with two games loaded onto it - Smash Bros and something called Splatoon, I wanted it for Smash Bros, but as a long time Smash Bros. player, it felt too odd to have my hands a foot away on the large, ungainly controller. Muscle memory was too strong. Since Splatoon was a new IP, it took less trouble to get accustomed to the controls - And I fell in love with the entire colorful, post-apocalyptic aesthetic of squids dressing terribly and slinging paint around. A few days ago, Nintendo Europe released a video showing off the Splatoon 3 edition Switch, and it is gorgeous . It looks more colorful than the actual game. Wish I made enough money consistently to justify getting one of these. Want to help with that? See here and share .   I'm not super sure when these...

 Find a better formatted version of this post on Notion ! Share it. Share this too. The more sharing, the better. Packaging the app: ✅ Pushing to DockerHub: ✅ See Error Pushing to Docker Hub below for how I troubleshot the issue! What is my app? A static webpage I had created for fun a few months ago. I knew it would come in handy! What did I do? Used demo static webpage for testing. Created Dockerfile 💡 It should be Dockerfile, no extension. Dockerfile.Dockerfile is incorrect! Used nginx Alpine as server and the following code: FROM scratch as static-site WORKDIR /app COPY . . FROM nginx:1.16.0-alpine as server COPY --from=static-site /app /usr/share/nginx/html EXPOSE 80 CMD [ "nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"] From Mwiza Kumwenda (see resources below). I wondered if I should use "start" in the CMD [ "nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"] list/tuple, but it worked without it. Exposed port 80 Created image;...

  By Morgan Lucas, From Adrian Cantrill’s More Than Certified / GitHub . Find the Notion Page HERE . Pictured: Someone who would get use out of the app. Technologies used: AWS, Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, S3, SNS & SES. What Is This?: A small app for pets to both you for cuddles that will send an alert to a phone and an email address. Both points of contact must be opted into first. Stage 1 I register 4 objects - Two email addresses (sending messages, receiving messages) and 2 phone numbers (one to receive SMS [text messages], and an origination number. Stage 2 I used CloudFormation (again, our old friend) to create an IAM role that email_reminder_lambda uses to interact with other AWS services. Really beats searching through the policies! In the Lambda console, I create a function that uses Python 3.9 rundown and use the LambdaRole created via CloudFormation. There are multiple entries called some variation of LambdaRole, so look for the one with SES/SNS and C...

 I was asked to write a post about...this blog! How and why I started it, and how it continues to help me. With a degree in Network Infrastructure, several certifications, but no real-world experience, I was “overqualified” for junior level roles straight out of college. Yet I still, simply put, couldn’t even begin to make a living in the field. This was 6 months after graduation, and 100s of applications and rejections in an allegedly ‘hot’ field. I had slipped through the cracks. Even though I’m in tech, I always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. It occurred to me: what if I wrote about tech? I decided to put what I had learned to use and start my portfolio , to not only show employers what I learned, but also to remind myself what I could do. The beginning involved networking with any spare bit of technology I could find in my home - routers from previous ISPs, out of commission phones. Then it grew to tracking how telecom providers operated in my town, day jobs I...

9/20/2023: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu    Find a better formatted version of this post on my Notion . Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash What is Terraform Remote It can store state files of Terraform remotely. It’s used more when there are multiple developers working on one thing, so someone’s state isn’t totally overwritten. Similar to CircleCI or Jenkins. Why Did You Try It? To see if I could! What Did You Do? The code worked - It was my S3 bucket permissions that were a little off, and did not allow me to place anything in there unless I went into the GUI and did it myself - which is time intensive and defeats the purpose of this project a bit. What Happened Afterward? Uh, well, VS Code suddenly had a lot of issues with permissions - It seems to have imploded the executable on my machine. I couldn’t start it, (’The location of this file could not be found’), but it wasn’t in my list of programs to uninstall - It was a ghost program. C...

 Want to read this with better formatting? Of course you do; Check out the page on Notion !   What's in the image? A simple static webpage I had created for fun a few months ago. I knew it would come in handy! What did I do? Used demo static webpage for testing. Created Dockerfile 💡 It should be Dockerfile, no extension. Dockerfile.Dockerfile is incorrect! Used nginx Alpine as server and the following code:  FROM scratch as static-site  WORKDIR /app  COPY . . [#to same directory] FROM nginx:1.16.0-alpine as server  COPY --from=static-site /app /usr/share/nginx/html  EXPOSE 80 [ #For web access] CMD [ "nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]   From Mwiza Kumwenda (see resources below).   CMD [ "nginx" , "-g" , "daemon off;" ]       I wondered if I should use "start" in the CMD [ "nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"] list/tuple, but it worked to package the image without it  Actually, push...

Want to see a better formatted version of this post? Check my Notion !   Created development environment using AWS and Terraform including a route table, internet gateway, security group, public subnet, and EC2 instance, using templates, provisioners, and key generation for remote access. NEW Concepts Learned aws_ami  A data segment instead of resource that pulls an owner number, filters by name (with  Userdata Made it a template file, it bootstaps the instance as well as installing the docker engine. AMI searcher in EC2 Console Going to search the AMI in the Instance Launcher, then returning to EC2 console to search it for the owner number and other info. ssh-keygen I used PuTTy for previous keys. Terraform’s homemade File function For relative file paths for shorter access The .tpl extension Makes templates that map to certain sections of the main code. Usually using ${ } , but that’s also very module-esque, I feel. Call it with templatefile() Provisioners ...

9/20/2023: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Want to read it with nice formatting? Check out the Notion page. Continuing from the post about Modules , let's look at Dynamic Blocks. What are Dynamic Blocks? It's a way to construct dynamically repeatable nested blocks in Terraform code. Think about using for_each - This is often used to make individual resources with a value to iterate over. Is This a Dynamic Block? I’ve done something like this, but it involved the multiple function (*) and a stand-in variable ${var.ex} . network_interface_ids = ["${element(azurerm_network_interface.CA-NetInt.*.id, 01)}"] The index (01) was the number of network_interface_ids one would want. Was that unknowingly a dynamic block, or something else? By all means, comment what you think. Apparently, It Wasn’t resource "aws_elastic_beanstalk_environment" "tfenvtest" { name = "tf-test-name" application ...

Wanted to try Cloud9 but didn't feel like making an EC2 instance in the GUI. So I made a Terraform file instead, remade a default VPC, and it took 20 minutes of troubleshooting. #AWS — Morgan (@runtcpip) February 1, 2022 9/20/2023: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     👉🏾 Find the Notion page of this post here , if it's easier for you. It certainly looks nicer!   Setup: An EC2 instance A reference to the default VPC, which I had to remake, as I had deleted mine.    Downloading Terraform into Cloud9: Instructions here . Done and Done. Now, How About Using It? The kicker (or blessing) is that Cloud9 doesn't auto save, like I’ve set my VSCode up to do. Had to do a lot of manual saving, but it wasn’t a struggle. The lock file is created, but I don't see it in my file system to the left until resources have been pushed, so I made a simple bucket to try it out. Because this instance is attached to my AWS account, I suppose anything I m...

Want to share this page easily? Check out the Notion version. I'm a strong believer in the ability to self learn ( waves hand at blog ), educate, and apply the knowledge. I believe that's how someone should get a position. However, we live in a world where you have to be in as many faces as possible for the greatest chance at survival. So why not bite the bullet and improve? Especially when you don't technically have to be in someone's face. I Tried to Say Something in Each Room, without Talking Anyone's Ear Off...👂🏼 People really have a lot to say in Spaces. I try to be impactful and succinct over wordy, unless needed. The challenge came from entering a room too late; What if I repeat something? If I have, no one pointed it out besides maybe a "Oh yeah, X person had brought that up, that's a good point.". Other times, the rooms were not accepting new speakers, and the pressure was off. Phew! ...Except When I Hosted My Own 📣 I was the only...

The general idea of the book is protecting your time* - From meetings, overbearing bosses, and phone calls, something I can relate to. I will be more receptive to you if you outline your ideas about the position in an e-mail rather than "hop on a call for a quick chat about this opportunity". I've taken to sending a link to this portfolio, a few relevant posts, and asking if this is in line with the position, and encouraging them to ask more questions. I'm picking out the quotes that spoke to me.   "Risks weren't that scary once you took them." It's true! "It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor." Struggling to drill down and use the Cybersecurity minor? Not for me. Security is to be respected and should be incorporated into new builds, and I will leave the CISSP to others and cheer them on.  Learning, writing, and teaching? That's more my speed.  "Most b...

Follow along with more DevOps stuff! It's not only CloudFormation and YAML we can use to build infrastructure in AWS - The ever-popular Python is here. I like how the docs say it should take around 6 minutes, and I'm here on maybe...minute 34 waiting for packages to finish installing. I'm sure it doesn't account for setup, but for a while, I was concerned I had misconfigured something. No, there are just a ton of packages to download.   Node.js had to not only open Powershell, but update my chocolatey and some VS Code components. Importing Python packages happens in consoles/terminals . You have to import them each session.  So, I open a terminal in VS Code to install this Pipenv Virtual Environment Package in theory. The hardest part is always installing Python packages, as I never remember what command works in Windows Terminal.  It's never pip install or apt-get, but 'python -m pip install [package], when you are not in the Python prompt. Now, into the cmd ...

9/20/2023: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu  Terraform (now OpenTofu) for AWS is somewhat clearer than Terraform for Azure - easier to grasp than YAML and it's finicky formatting. After pushing some DevOps Terraform (TF) configurations live to AWS, I wondered if I could push a static webpage. Situation - Why Would You Use This? To quickly spin up the front-end for a simple webpage that might take user input after attaching it to back end services that accept and hold the data.  What Other Options Are There? I've documented hosting static webpages through Azure before on here through various methods - The process is somewhat intensive and relies strongly on interconnected systems. GitHub to host the code Azure Webapps to take the code and display it Another option would be using Netlify,  but that works best for truly single-page apps like this . It looks like it has different pages to the untrained eye, but it's only one. Task - How Is It Done? ...

My laptop is refurbished. I've written about how there are a few ... quirks. Being a technology professional, I felt okay with adopting an older machine, knowing I had the skill to fix moderate issues. From dying drivers to monitor massacres, I've ID'd, solved, and documented a lot of issues.  The newest one was my Wi-Fi adapter dropping the connection to a specific extender. While troubleshooting, I was curious about doing recon of WiFi networks and broadcasting devices anyway. That issue? A power setting. It was so determined to save power, it would disconnect. The extender is also flirting with the older end of 6 years old.  The battery needs to be replaced, but that's new to me. As a Windows laptop, there are a plethora of options to pick. How do you decide which one is safest?  I am suddenly concerned about this despite having 3 unofficial, 15$ Macbook Air chargers from eBay, and no explosions. But let's move onto the Site Survey - Where can I find the stronges...