Free SSL Courtesy Of Cloudflare

I was recently listening to an episode of Security Now when I heard them mention that Cloudflare has a free tier. While I’ve never personally used their service I’ve heard about it a ton of times. Hearing that they have a free tier peaked my interest so I went exploring.

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The Case Of The Missing Cassandra Gossip Packets

One of my recent tasks was to automate the creation of multi-region Cassandra clusters. I’m still pretty green with Cassandra but have been having some recent success with creating multi-dc (replication group) clusters inside of a single AWS region. The story that follows summarizes what was a painful few days of debugging….

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Rethinking Datastax Opscenter HA on AWS

Recently I’ve been working on building a highly available installation of Datastax Opscenter in an automated fashion on AWS. I’ve decided to abandon my pursuit of installing Opscenter with automatic fail over and will propose an alternate solution which I believe still achieves high availability as well as much better self-healing.

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Flashing DD-WRT On A Linksys WRT1200AC V2

This weekend I decided it was time to replace the stock firmware on my WRT1200AC v2. I’ve had the unit for a while now and it’s been working well but I had a little time on my hands so I opted to give it a go. The process itself was pretty easy, but finding the right information was not. Hopefully this saves someone else some time…

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Welcome Hugo

Well… I’ve gone and done it again. I’ve decided to switch the platform I am using to generate this site. This time around I’m going with Hugo

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Speeding Up Test Kitchen

This past week I was turned on to a tiny, but game changing (for me) gem named kitchen-sync. I tend to use test-kitchen in a wide variety of configurations. Sometimes I’m using it to drive Vagrant, most of the time, I’m using it drive Docker, but there are times when I need it to drive remove instances such as EC2. One of my biggest pain points in this last configuration is the time it takes to copy of the cookbooks to the remote machine. [Read More]

Jekyll with fenced code blocks

While hacking up some markdown files to use under Jekyll I hit a weird issue where code blocks written with triple ticks (aka fenced code blocks) wouldn’t render correctly. When writing markdown, I like to express code blocks using the fenced-code-blocks syntax. I’m just getting up to speed with using Jekyll and after reading their documentation I found I could use their highlight liquid tag, but I just didn’t care for the look and feel of that. [Read More]

Modifying your PoshGit Prompt

If your using Github for Windows, there is a good chance you might be using the Powershell Git Shell. If your like me you may want to customize how that prompt looks. Turns out this is not nearly as trivial as it would initially seem. If your not familiar with PoshGit, you can read a little more about it on their github page. In a nutshell, this integration enhances your current Powershell prompt to provide you with git related information right in your prompt. [Read More]