Monthly Archives: September 2020

News from the blog 2020-09-21

  • I have benchmarked three different CPUs and two Compute optimized Amazon AWS instances with CMIPS 1.0.5 64bit. The two Intel Xeon baremetals equip 2 x Intel Xeon Processor and the third baremetal equips a single Intel Core i7-7800X:

If you’re surprised by the number of cores reported by the Amazon instance m5d.24xlarge, and even more for the baremetal c5n.metal, you’re guessing well that this comes from having Servers with 4 CPUs for Compute Optimized series.

CMIPS ScoreExecution time (seconds)Type of instanceTotal coresCPU model seen by Linux
5853634.16Amazon AWS m5d.24xlarge964 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8175M CPU @ 2.50GHz
5416936.92Amazon AWS c5n.metal724 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8124M CPU @ 3.00GHz
2632975.96Baremetal482 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz
2173292.02Baremetal402 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v3 @ 2.30GHz
9810203.87Desktop computer12Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7800X CPU @ 3.50 GHz

  • I can recommend these courses in Linux Academy:

https://linuxacademy.com/cp/library/catalog/view/DevOpsCourses

I’m finishing the 24 hours long Implementing a Full CI/CD Pipeline:

https://linuxacademy.com/cp/modules/view/id/218

  • When I can choose I use Linux, but in many companies I work with Windows workstations. I’ve published a list of useful Software I use in all my Windows workstations.
  • WFH I currently use two external monitors attached to the laptop. I planned to add a new one using a Display Port connected to the Dell USB-C dongle that provides me Ethernet and one additional HDMI as well. I got the cable from Amazon but unfortunately something is not working. In order to make myself comfortable and see some the graphs of the systems worldwide as I have on the office’s displays, I created a small HTML page, that joins several monitor pages in one single web page using frames.
    This way I only have one page loaded on the browser, maximized, and this monitor is dedicated to those graphs of the stats of the Systems.
    Something very simple, but very useful. You can extend the number of columns and rows it to have more graphics in the same screen.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Casa Monitor</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET cols="50%,50%">
  <FRAMESET rows="50%,*">
      <FRAME src="http://players-all-games/">
      <FRAME src="http://monthly-graphs/">
  </FRAMESET>
  <FRAMESET rows="50%,*">
	  <FRAME src="http://grafana/databases/">
	  <FRAME src="http://kibana/clusters/">
  </FRAMESET>
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>

If you don’t have the space or the resources for more monitors you can use the ingenious.

I have a cheap HDMI switch that allows me to do PinP (Picture in Picture) with one main source on the monitor, and two using a fraction of their original space. It may allow you to see variants in graphics.

And in you have only a single monitor, you can use a chrome extension that rotates tabs, which is also very useful.

Be careful if you use the reload features with software like Jira or Confluence. If they are slow normally, imagine if you mess it by reloading every 30 seconds… I discourage you to use auto refresh on these kind of Softwares.

My laptop and my Xbox One controller

This past week I have connected the XBOX One X Controller to the Windows laptop for the first time. Normally I use the Pc only for strategy games, but I wanted to play other games like Lost Planet 3, or Fall Guys in a console mode way. I figured that would be very easy and it was. You turn on the controller, press the connect button like you did to pair with the console, and in Windows indicate pair to a Xbox One controller. That’s it.

  • I’ve also updated my Python 3 Combat Guide, to add the explanation, step by step, about how to refactor and make resilient, and add Unit Testing to a spaghetti code, and turn it into a modern OOP. Is currently 255 DIN-A4 pages.
  • This is something I wanted to share with you for a while.
    One of the most funny things in my career is what I call:
    Squirrel Strikes Back

I named this as the first incident where a provider told that the reason of a fiber failure was a squirrel chewing the cable.

I popularized this with my friends in Systems Administration and SRE and when they suffer a Squirrel Attack incident, they forward it to me, for great joy.

I’m used to construction or gas, water, electricity, highways repair operations on the cities accidentally cutting fiber cables, thunders or truck accidents on the highway breaking the floor and cutting tubes and issues like that. I’ve been seeing that for around 25 years.

So the first time I saw a provider referring to a squirrel cutting the cables it was pretty hilarious. :)

In my funny mental picture: I could visually imagine a cable thrown in the middle of the forest, over trees, and a squirrel chewing it as it tastes like peanuts. :) or a shark cutting a Google’s or Facebook’s intercontinental cable thrown without any protection. ;)

The sense of humor and the good vibes, are two of the most important things in life.

How to recover access to your Amazon AWS EC2 instance if you loss your Private Key for SSH

This article covers the desperate situation where you had generated one or more instances, instructed Amazon to use a SSH Key Pair certs where only you have the Private Key, your instances are running, for example, an eCommerce site, running for months, and then you loss your Private Key (.pem file), and with it the SSH access to your instances’ Data.

Actually I’ve seen this situation happening several times, in actual companies. Mainly Start ups. And I solved it for them.

Assuming that you didn’t have a secondary method to access, which is another combination of username/password or other user/KeyPairs, and so you completely lost the access to the Database, the Webservers, etc… I’m going to show you how to recover the data.

For this article I will consider an scenario where there is only one Instance, which contains everything for your eCommerce: Webserver, code, and Database… and is a simple config, with a single persistent drive.

Warning: be very careful as if you use ephemeral drives, contents will be lost is you power off the instance.

Method 1: Quicker, launching a new instance from the previous

Step1: The first step you will take is to close the access from outside, using the Firewall, to avoid any new changes going to the disk. You can allow access to the instance only from your static Ip in the office/home.

Step 2: You’ll wait for 5 minutes to allow any transaction going on to conclude, and pending writes to be flushed to disk.

Step 3: From Amazon AWS Console, EC2, you’ll request an Snapshot. That step is to try to get extra security. Taking an Snapshot from a live, mounted, filesystem, is not the best of ideas, specially of a Database, but we are facing a desperate situation so we’re increasing the numbers of leaving this situation without Data loss. This is just for extra security and if everything goes well at the end you will not need this snapshot.

Make sure you select No reboot.

Step 4: Be very careful if you have extra drives and ephemeral drives.

Step 5: Wait till the Snapshot completes.

Step 6: Then request a graceful poweroff. Amazon will try to poweroff the Server in a gentle way. This may take two minutes.

Step 7: When the instance is powered off, request a new Snapshot. This is the one we really want. The other was just to be more safe. If you feel confident you can just unclick No Reboot on the previous Step and do only one Snapshot.

Step 8: Wait till the Snapshot completes.

Step 9: Generate and upload the new key you will use to AWS Console, or ask Amazon to generate a key pair for you. You can do it while creating the new instance through the wizard.

Step 10: Launch a new instance, based on your snapshot AMI. This will generate a copy of your previous instance (using the Snapshot) for the new one. Select the new Key pair. Finish assigning the Security groups, the elastic ip…

Step 11: Start the new instance. You can select a different flavor, like a more powerful instance, if you prefer. (scale vertically)

Step 12: Test your access by login via SSH with the new pair keys and from your static Ip which has access in the Firewall.

ssh -i /home/carles/Desktop/Data/keys/carles-ecommerce.pem ubuntu@54.208.225.14

Step 13: Check that the web Starts correctly, check the Database logs to see if there is any corruption. Should not have any if graceful shutdown went well.

Step 14: Reopen the access from the Firewall, so the world can connect to your instance.

Method 2: Slower, access the Data and rebuild whatever you need

The second method is exactly the same until Step 6 included.

Step 7: After this, you will create a new instance based on your favorite OS, with a new pair of Keys.

Step 8: You’ll detach the Volume from the eCommerce previous instance (the one you lost access).

Step 9: You’ll attach the Volume to the new instance.

Step 10: You’ll have access to the Data from the previous instance in the new volume. type cat /proc/partitions or df -h to see the mountpoints available. You can then download or backup, or install the Software again and import the Database…

Step 11: Check that everything works, and enable the access worldwide to the Web in the Firewall (Security Group Inbound Rules).

If you are confident enough, you can use this method to upgrade the OS or base Software of your instance, making it part of your maintenance window. For example, to get the last version of Ubuntu or CentOS, MySQL, Python or PHP, etc…

Programs I use for Windows in my Workstations

I love Linux and Linux tools and I’m a big fan of it, using it for Servers since 1995.

However some companies use Windows for the Workstations, and that’s not necessarily bad.

So I describe here the tools I use to maximize productivity.

Antivirus

That really depends on my employers. I’ve my opinion about several of them.

Apache Directory Studio

For working with LDAP.

BalenaEtcher

To flash images to USB and external drives. https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I also use Rufus https://rufus.ie/

Chrome

Debut
This is a Commercial Software to capture video. I record bugs, tutorials, internal web training sessions…

Docker Desktop for Windows

But not in the laptops cause the hyper-v may conflict with the BitLocker drive encryption and may cause the entire drive to be lost.

However as much as possible, I will do everything in Linux Workstations and Servers.

(CRLF problems in Docker Linux are horrible)

Editplus

Very powerful for doing replacement over large CSV files.

Firefox

Filezilla

GIMP

HeidiSQL

Free Database Manager for MariaDB, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL.

Is compatible with Wine, so you can use it on Linux.

LastPass (for Teams)

With Chrome’s plugin.

LibreOffice

MobaXTerm

With zmodem, sftp, SSH, tunnel….

MyDebugger

A MySQL debugger. Specially useful for Stored Procedures.

Is compatible with Wine, so you can use it on Linux.

OBS

https://obsproject.com/ is a screen recorder Software, for Linux, Mac Os X and Windows.

One Note

OpenVPN

Opera

Specially useful the option of using a VPN.

Project (Microsoft Project)

PuTTy

PyCharm, PHPStorm, CLion from JetBrains

Python

Radmin

A powerful Server Remote Control for Windows, much more stable than VNC.

Remote Desktop Connection

Rufushttps://rufus.ie

To toast ISOs to USB.

Slack

Toad for Oracle

Videopad

Video editor

VirtualBox
Yes, I always have a Linux VM.

Visio

For the Diagrams.

VLC

Video player

VMWare Player

VNC

Normally RealVNC.

WinRAR

Zoom