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 […]
Install PowerShell v5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 or 2012 R2
Prior to updating to PowerShell version 5 make sure to be running the latest version of .NET Framework (.NET 4.6.1 as of this writing). See Checking .NET Versions. Check Current Version of PowerShellRun either $Host.Version or $PSVersionTable.PSVersionInstall latest version of .NET. PowerShell 5 is part of Windows Management Framework (WMF) version 5 and can be […]
Install .NET 4.6.1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 or 2012 R2
Start by downloading .NET 4.6.1 from Microsoft. Launch the installer – I typically do this by running the command c:tempNDP461-KB3102436-x86-x64-AllOS-ENU.exe from an elevated PowerShell. Accept the licensing agreement and wait…. Check Version(s) of .NET InstalledFrom an elevated PowerShell run the following set of commands: Get-ChildItem ‘HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoftNET Framework SetupNDP’ -recurse |Get-ItemProperty -name Version,Release -EA 0 |Where { […]
Use PowerShell to Save Excel Worksheet as CSV
I’m working on a PowerShell script to launch some virtual servers on VMWare based on input from a CSV file. To create the CSV file I’m using Excel, and I have more than one worksheet in the Excel workbook. Since it’s a bit of a hassle to use Excel’s GUI to save a given worksheet […]
History of Internet Addressing
Volumes have been written about the Internet and its protocols so what I have here is nothing new or ground-breaking. It is, however, a good overview of the history of IP addressing, related Request For Comments (RFC) and other links. I’ve been working with the Internet Protocols for a while, including data center builds, network […]
How Did One Guy Build A World Class Web Infrastructure Serving Over One Billion Calls Per Day?
On Monday, December 15, 2008 I went to work for an online video start-up. On my first day our video players loaded on 384 of our partner’s web pages. As you can see from the first chart that was actually a pretty good day for us (it was actually our biggest day to date) as […]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Although I’ve been working with Amazon Web Services for a few years now I only recently learned about AWS certifications. So today I went to an authorized testing center (for the first time in several years) and took a certification exam. And didn’t do too bad. Back in the day I took dozens of exams […]