Shami's Blog

Edit: 31/7/2022: I’m currently migrating all my logstash configurations to Vector , it has been much kinder to me than Logstash has ever been.

I maintain an ELK server running on Ubuntu 20.04 for testing. One issue I have faced is the Logstash service hanging on reboot. The server would not reboot and I end up having to power cycle.

Read More - Logstash Hanging When Rebooting Ubuntu

In my previous post I discussed how I use a wrapper script to back up a fleet of servers.

Read More - Detect if your Script is Running in CRON

ZFS has been one of my favorite tools since I discovered it in 2014. I can’t count how many times it has saved me from disasters. I’ve even had systems that wouldn’t boot but still managed to recover data from them with a rescue disk.

Read More - Back Up Multiple Servers With zxfer

I was recently tasked with auditing the AMIs we are currently using for our AWS account. I could have just checked all machines but thought jq might be a better way to do it, and it actually is.

Read More - Get A List of EC2 Instances And The AMIs Used to Launch Them

It is always better to tighten the firewall configuration on your servers. Limiting SSH connections from a defined list of IP addresses greatly reduces the attack surface as well as load; the firewall is much more efficient at blocking connections than sshd. The best approach is to have a static IP or connect through a bastion host which is protected via a VPN. But sometimes that is not feasible.

Read More - Using Dynamic DNS with pf, iptables, and gomplate

I have recently switched to using Sublime Merge as my Git client. I know other clients have the same features but for me Sublime Merge is just a pleasure to use.

Read More - Why You Shouldn't Use the Windows 10 SSH Agent

We’ve all been there, something gets stuck and there is no way to fix it except for a reboot, but even rebooting through SSH isn’t working and you don’t have physical access to the server or an out-of-bound way to power cycle. This has mostly bit me while working on NFS but there has been other cases. Adding it here for reference.

Read More - Simulate Pressing the Reset Button

In part 1 and part 2 I briefly talked about modules and workspaces. This time I will take things a bit further.

Read More - Writing Reusable Terraform Code, Part 3

In part 1 , I talked about modules and how they are the first step into reducing duplicate resources. Here I will talk about workspaces .

Read More - Writing Reusable Terraform Code, Part 2

I’m fairly new to Terraform, yes I have been using it for the past 2 or 3 years, but my use-case was quite simple; Create a few servers in DigitalOcean or Hetzner , install a web stack, and use the outputs to update the load balancer and the firewall.

Read More - Writing Reusable Terraform Code, Part 1