Surviving an(other) AWS Outage – US-West-2 Outage 8/31/2021

I have been running workloads on AWS since 2008, and have experienced a few either AZ or Region-based outages. Although rare various issues can arise which cause one or more services to have an outage, or as AWS typically terms it, “some customers are experiencing increased error rates….” or something like that. The first such, […]

End of an Era – EC2-Classic Retiring

I first tried out EC2 from AWS in late 2008 and wrote this simple post about it. I wrote about (the very few) EC2 instance types in the early days…. How to do things like ping EC2 instances after enabling security group rules using early AWS CLI tools…. Some of the early tools, like Elasticfox […]

FREE (or VERY cheap) EC2 Proxy Server – Windows Over Ubuntu Proxy on AWS

Ever been sitting in a hotel (or your home) and tried to watch your favorite sports team on a streaming service, but couldn’t due to the archaic and draconian broadcast licensing agreements which ban in-market online distribution?!? And the name brand hotel chain doesn’t carry the local affiliate for your pennant-chasing team?!? WTF!?! Or, you […]

A Few of My Favorite Online Tools

IP Calculator ipcalc takes an IP address and netmask and calculates the resulting broadcast, network, Cisco wildcard mask, and host range. By giving a second netmask, you can design subnets and supernets. It is also intended to be a teaching tool and presents the subnetting results as easy-to-understand binary values. IP Calculator Results. DNS Propagation […]

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Official Study Guide: Associate Exam Review

As I posted recently I’ve been using some great resources to prepare for some AWS exams. In my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam review I raved about how good it is in assisting to prepare for the exam. Now I want to talk about the, “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Official Study Guide: Associate […]

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam Review

I’ve been working with AWS for 10 years now and love it more than ever! About four years ago when I first learned of AWS Certifications I went right out and took the Architecting on AWS Associates exam and was able to pass it the first time. When it came time to re-certify a couple […]

Disable TLS on Server 2012 R2 in the Registry with PowerShell

It’s common knowledge that TLS is preferred over SSL because it provides better security, and because an industry-wide push to stop using SSL, use HTTPS exclusively (instead of HTTP), and increase security overall has been underway for a while. But it’s also important to use the latest version of TLS. Fortunately Windows Server 2012 R2 […]

Shrinking EBS Windows Boot Volume

After migrating my physical server to AWS recently I needed to shrink the boot volume a bit. The original server’s drive was ~1TB, so that’s the size my boot EBS volume was after the migration, but since I only have about 125GB of used space I wanted to reduce the overall volume size to about 150GB. […]

Migrating Physical Windows Servers to AWS AMI – EC2

Doing What They Say Can’t be Done I’ve had to do this task a few times but because they were separated by a significant amount of time both the methods changed slightly and my memory of the exact steps faded. These are the new-and-improved way to convert a bare metal Windows server (I’m doing 2008 […]

HowTo: Install AWS CLI on Both Windows and Linux

Several years ago before the unified AWS CLI was released I wrote about installing the EC2 command line tools. Now it’s time to update that. It goes without saying that over the decade Amazon has been providing cloud services their interfaces and tools have matured greatly (along with their overall offerings). Early on Amazon didn’t […]