Author: joelh

I ran into a problem where a stack would not build on AWS with the above error message. When you tried to create the stack it would simply hang and wait for 40 minutes or so, and then rollback. The problem turned out to be a parameter of type: And the IAM role building the…

Role Chaining is mentioned in the AWS Documentation but it is not clear exactly how you are meant to implement it in practice. It is used when you want to use one role to assume another role, which may be used to indicate the type of task you are performing as the app or may…

Enterprise IT has been taken by storm by DevOps as both a buzzword and a movement. In this post I’m going to attempt the impossible – describe what DevOps is and isn’t, why it is so popular and what is the core value that is likely to remain once the hype train has left the…

I’ve heard of this bimodal IT, what is it ? Bimodal IT is a concept introduced by Gartner that seeks to assist large organisations who want to adopt the new coolness – Agile, CI/CD, DevOps – but are stuck with a legacy fleet of brownfields apps. The basic idea is to divide your development into two streams,…

On Sunday (05/07/2015 – Australian Date Format) my Skype sent out a series of links to people in the format of the title above. I was using the computer at the time but I wasn’t doing anything on Skype. My first thought was a virus, malware or trojan so I ran a full scan of…

Hi Friends, This site has languished for quite a while for various reasons. The gap it filled in terms of sharing interesting things I found on the web was largely replaced by social media, and I went through a period of not knowing what to write about or how to go about it. I’ve recently…

If you receive this error while trying to do an upgrade of your kernel on stable debian, it could be because your device.map is wrong. Try the following: mv /boot/grub/device.map /boot/grub/device.map.bak mkdevicemap

No block given aye? One of the problems with the magic of rails is that you get very magic error messages back. In my case the fix was to use find(:all) instead of find_all() which has now been deprecated

I’m releasing two small perl scripts I wrote which provide the client-connect and client-disconnect scripts for OpenVPN such that you can dynamically create IPtables firewall rules based on LDAP group memberships. You push out routes to all your internal networks to the user then using IPtables only allow traffic to specific destinations and ports. This…

I signed up my django project to WebFaction. I’m currently evaluating their service and will post my opinion of them once I get the site up and running.