I thought I’d upgrade my Ubuntu XPS13 from Groovy-whatever-it-was to Hirsute Hippo (21.04 I guess?). It moved me to use Wayland by default. Some bits feel OK – somehow the visual feedback from app launching seems better (it may not be any quicker) …
But …
The alt-tab window switching thing often stops working – this has happened a number of times, across reboots.
Apps appear to be running in the UI, when they’re not.
I’ve had the desktop icons randomly display on top of a full screen video (possibly Amazon Prime Video?)
I’ve had the launcher buttons just stop working
I can’t use a clipboard manager (so no copy+paste buffers to cycle through)
So you’ve created an ElasticSearch 7 standalone cluster, in Azure, and wish to use the Azure Repository plugin to handle backups.
You’re also conscious about not exposing storage accounts on public IP addresses (if they need not be)….
So, given you’ve created a storage account within Azure called e.g. mysimplestorage and given it a private-link connection to the same virtual network your ElasticSearch Servers will be on … you should find it has a hostname like mysimplestorage.blob.core.windows.net (see the ‘Endpoints’ “tab” within the storage account. That ‘mysimplestorage‘ is needed below.
What else needs doing ?
Well,
a) you don’t want proxy settings in your elasticsearch.yml file (azure.client.default.proxy.host: …. and other things)
b) You probably do want to create a Managed Identity to attach to your virtual machines, which gives them access to to the storage account (I called mine ‘elasticsearch7’ as I have no imagination). Assign that role ‘owner’ for the given storage account (perhaps there is a finer grained permission?)
c) When creating new VMs for the cluster, you can use :
az vm identity assign -g MyResourceGroup -n NewServerName –identities elasticsearch7
d) Edit the Storage Account’s access control list, and add the role in
e) install the azure repository plugin on your elasticsearch nodes
At this point, restart all your ElasticSearch nodes (for me they don’t seem to pickup keystore settings until a restart) and then go into Kibana and configure the backup routine.
I needed to build some Virtual Machine images (using packer) for work the other day.
I already have a configuration setup for packer (but for AWS) and when trying to add in support for an ‘azure-arm‘ builder, I kept getting the following error message in my web browser as I attempted to authenticate packer with azure :
“AADSTS650052: The app needs to access to a service (https://vault.azure.net) that your organization \”<random-id>\” has not subscribed or enabled. Contact your IT Admin to review the configuration of your service subscriptions.”
This isn’t the most helpful of error messages, when I’m probably meant to be the “IT Admin”.
After eventually giving in (as I couldn’t find any similar reports of this problem) and reaching out to our contact in Microsoft, it turns out we needed to enable some additional Resource Providers in the Subscription…. and of course the name has to be slightly different 😉 (Microsoft.KeyVault). Oh well….
Having done this, Packer does now work (Hurrah!)
Hopefully this will help someone else in the future.
A few weeks ago I bought an ASUS PN50 as a new desktop (to replace an aging Intel Skull Canyon NUC, which was starting to crash once a week – presumably with a hardware fault).
I’d given up waiting for Intel to release a new NUC version – but of course a few weeks after I took the plunge they did release a new version…. Oh well.
Anyway, why this PN-50 thing ?
Relatively low power consumption
Hopefully quiet(ish)
Doesn’t take up much room (smaller than most Intel NUCs)
Faster than previous computer (and more processor cores)
Supports up to 64Gb RAM (I wanted something with at least 32Gb)
I could re-use the memory and m.2 storage from the skull canyon (although it only supports one of my two m.2 drives 🙁 )
Supports up to 4 monitors (I have 3×27″ Dell UHD monitors) out of the box (HDMI and displayport over USB C)
Integrated graphics etc
Easy to setup/install – it’s effectively an AMD “NUC”.
So, here’s a non-scientific review …
Setup – this was fairly straight forward, although I did need to update the BIOS for some reason (perhaps as I was trying to get multi-monitor support working? Initially it wasn’t behaving, until I started using the DisplayPort MST functionality of my Dell monitor to daisy chain one monitor off the other…..).
Performance – it seems fairly quick (quicker than my Skull Canyon) but in the process of ‘upgrading’ I changed from Debian Buster to Ubuntu 20.10 …. so it’s possible I’m not quite comparing like-for-like. I also don’t have any test values to support any statement(s).
Quietness – the BIOS allows for setting quiet / performance / normal fan behaviour. When the fan is busy, it is noisier than the skull canyon. This has made me realise just how quiet the skull canyon was in comparison. It’s crashed a couple of times – with no kernel trace given – so I’ve recently changed from ‘quiet’ to ‘performance’ setting to see if this would make any difference and so far it seems to be OK.
Hardware wise – my Dell USB soundbar seems to reset itself every 30+ minutes when I’m on a video call – what I experience is the sound turning off for about 3-4 seconds (presumably while the USB stack or hardware reset itself). I’m not sure if this has fixed itself yet – as I applied a BIOS update a few days ago and haven’t had many calls since.
So as a rubbish summary – it’s a shame ASUS didn’t put better heat sinks in / improve the thermal design of it ….. it could have been better (in terms of quietness). It feels like there are a few BIOS related issues to solve (USB/Soundbar etc), but hopefully they’ll get resolved soon. Once they are, it’ll become a near perfect ‘desktop’ for me.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a sane President in the USA.
It’s been a long time since everyday life was normal (stupid Coronavirus).
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post.
(one of the above isn’t really news worthy).
Since I last bothered to write much of a blog post, this is kind of what’s been going on in my life …. aside from losing hair and finding my beard is increasingly going grey.
We now have a dog again (well, really since Oct 2019 ish). She’s soft and lovely and somehow puts up with almost torture from the children. She likes to bark, take me for walks and stop me from vegetating too much. Unfortunately she’s not very good at running. 🙁
Pickle!
Work wise, I’ve been working for Orlo (nee SocialSignIn) for the last 4 ish years. I’m a backend PHP developer / sysadmin … and for about the last 6 months I’ve also been the ‘dev team leader’ …. which mostly involves managing the development team (and trying to make sure everyone’s staying sane during a pandemic). Life there is fun and challenging. Recently I’ve migrated a significant part of the application from Rackspace to AWS (so touching on things like EC2, CloudWatch, SQS, Autoscale, Load Balancers, VPC Networking and VPNs etc).
Family wise – the children are growing bigger; one’s now even a teenager. Our house feels ever more cluttered and smaller and we’re still dithering over whether we should convert the conservatory into a normal extension or move to somewhere bigger.
Thanks to the joys of Coronavirus, I’m now sporting a trendy haircut that looks like it really was the result of an accident with a lawnmower.
Open source development wise, I’ve woken up the Postfixadmin project a bit and finally made a new major release (3.3) and then subsequently tried to deal with the various bug reports (which were kind of inevitable as no one really tests a beta/unstable release).
Technically – eventually I’d like to get time to learn another language (perhaps GoLang) and maybe do some certifications or qualifications (probably around Amazon Web Services – which given I’ve been using it for the last 4-5 years ‘in anger’ should be relatively easy).
Currently one of my favourite albums to listen to is The Köln Concert –
I finally got fed up with my Google Pixelbook (nice keyboard, but ChromeOS was just too annoying and it seemed to lack the ‘oomph’ when it came to using e.g. phpStorm).
Anyway, I bought a i7 Dell xps 13 (9300 …. it has an i7-1065G7 processor).
Random thoughts :
It’s fan is quite noisy (not loud, but high pitched/noticeable). Perhaps I’m too used to the silence of the pixelbook?
It’s keyboard is too firm – I’d be a lot happier if the keys were less stiff.
It was straight forward enough to upgrade it from the supplied Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04. (Well done Canonical).
The BIOS update tool Dell bundle in seems to work well (and “just works”).
Viewing the text console (ctrl+alt+function-key) is almost impossible (text is too small)
It hasn’t yet got too hot for my lap, but is warmer than the pixelbook
The screen sometimes “flickers” and changes brightness. It doesn’t turn off, but does seem to flick between two levels.
The screen is really nice (barely any Bezel)
The laptop itself is barely bigger than the Chromebook, but I so wish I’d just bought one of these now rather than trying the Chromebook route a year or whatever ago.
Suspend/Resume appears to work well (I open and close the lid, it’s ready to go ….)
I’ve recently read “Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race” ( Amazon )
It’s something of an eye opening read, and while I (obviously) struggle to relate to some of the issues (especially when it covers Feminism), I’m hoping it’s helped make me more understanding.
So I guess I need to “talk about Race/Racism” with some white people somewhere ….
I live in a predominantly “white” town, grew up in a predominantly “white” area (Herefordshire/Mid Wales). So I’m sure I have some biases I’m not necessarily aware of. This Hidden Brain podcast was interesting listening – covering implicit bias – and this Harvard Project which highlights the power the media has over us (creating associations, stereotypes etc).
From the few non-white people I’ve spoken to, their experiences seem to mirror what’s in this BBC news article (“Should I remove or reply to my racist Facebook friend?“). (Something I’ve been tempted to do with a family member a few times….)
I’m reminded of Bytemark’s trial with anonymous job application process, in an effort to reduce the chance of unconscious bias creeping into an interview/screening. Something I’m trying to push for at $dayjob.
When trying to use these new fangled things on Debian (Stretch) I needed to edit/create /etc/udev/rules.d/titan.rules and put in it something like the following – else nothing happens when you try using them …
This is based on e.g. the ‘dmesg’ output looking something like this for the bluetooth/usb variant :
usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 46 using xhci_hcd
usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=096e, idProduct=085b, bcdDevice=35.02
usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 1-2: Product: ePass FIDO
usb 1-2: Manufacturer: FS
and this for the plain USB YubiKey like one :
usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 47 using xhci_hcd
usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=096e, idProduct=0858, bcdDevice=46.00
usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 1-1: Product: U2F
usb 1-1: Manufacturer: FT
hid-generic 0003:096E:0858.0014: hiddev3,hidraw4: USB HID v1.00 Device [FT U2F] on usb-0000:00:14.0-1/input0
