Tech Debug

Traditionally if one was to secure a web server using TLS (or previously, SSL) – then one would configure your web server to use TCP port 443 to listen for TLS requests from clients (browsers). When a browser connects to the web server using the HTTPS protocol, the server would encrypt the communications and all would be well with the world. A problem occurs when you use name based Virtual Hosting on your web server.

A client I’m consulting for is using Jive as their EDRMS of choice. It’s not bad; but after using Office 365 recently, Jive is not as integrated as you’d like with Office 2013. Working in the cloud (Jive is a cloud EDRMS) requires that another client you may connect from have the appropriate client plugin. In the case of Office 2013, you need to install the Jive plugin from their community website.

I’ve recently been working more day to day on Amazon Web Services, and I found it a little unwieldy to navigate around policy documents assigned to IAM groups. Sometimes you just want to have a local copy of the policies to edit/play with/look at. Therefore, I came up with a quick script to solve this. Enjoy… Of course, the AWS SDK for Powershell is required.

I host this blog in WordPress, and it’s a great micro CMS with all the bells and whistles. I also publish and host the XML file for a podcast of the Angry Human. It’s picked up by feed burner, and then iTunes takes the feed burner RSS feed and et voila! All the Apple listeners to the show Angry Human by David Biedny get their recent shows! I recently had an issue where I’ve moved this site from Rackspace Cloud Sites to the Godaddy Managed WordPress sites.

I came across a useful bash alias. I don’t know where. I’ll call it dureport. alias dureport='du -sdk * | awk '\''{printf "%12d\t%s\n", $1, substr($0,index($0,$2),80)}'\'' |sort -r'

Everyone loves automated processes. With BizTalk 2013 if you want to provide a repeatable install; you need automation. PowerShell is where it’s at. Lucky for me, other very skilled people already have written PowerShell scripts providing the capability to create hosts and host instances. Sandro Pereira has written and published a PowerShell script to create your BizTalk host instances based upon the best practice of host separation. However, it’s only written for BizTalk 2010.

It has been a year from not blogging at all, due to a hectic professional schedule. I’ve been busy dealing with BizTalk 2010, WCF services and all things SOA. One thing I’ve learnt is I’m not a hardcore developer. I’m much better at implementing technical solutions and server sysadmin. I think I’ll stick to that. In the meantime my knowledge and skill level with BizTalk has gone up now having almost 2 years experience developing, deploying and maintaining an ESB based around BizTalk 2010 and WCF services.