A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

Today, I'm going to try to simplify our architecture or at least management of Kerberos artifacts as they relate to CockroachDB by introducing a load balancer. Given a presence of LB, we can obfuscate the CockroachDB cluster architecture from Kerberos and ease the managment of Kerberos keytabs as well as service principal names.

This is my fourth installment of CockroachDB and Kerberos coverage. Today, I'm going to demonstrate a way to override a service principal name from the default.

This is the third in the series of articles on CockroachDB and GSSAPI. Today, we're going to automate all things with Docker and docker-compose specifically to stand-up a quick and repeatable environment to troubleshoot CockroachDB and Kerberos. Most of the articles I write are based on specific corner cases my customers are stumbling on. Today, I'm going to talk about a basic environment I would use to debug a situation with Kerberos and CockroachDB integration. In the following posts, I will cover actual corner cases I've seen to date.

I've been an avid user of VirtualBox for a long time! Much of what I've learned in my career had something to do with VirtualBox. I do all my testing and new tutorials in VirtualBox, I use Hortonworks Sandbox VirtualBox image for my work. This is probably not a new feature but it is definitely new to me because I just noticed it, VirtualBox has an option to run in different modes, at least from the GUI perspective. I know there's a lot of untapped potential in using the VBox CLI but I haven't had much need for it yet. Back to the topic, you can now launch your VMs in headless and detached modes right from the GUI! Usually, when I launch a VM in normal way, the VM window just hangs there and is pretty annoying. I prefer to SSH to a running VM from a console instead of using the VM window. Now I can launch a VM in headless mode and it's business as usual. No extra windows, and I bet the memory toll on my machine is also smaller. When you click on start your VM, you no...

I run Manjaro Linux for my development work. I love the nature of rolling releases. I also love Manjaro because they include all of the latest software like Netbeans 8.0.2 and Virtualbox 4.3.26. I don't need to worry about compiling software, it's just there. I look forward to all of the minor releases that Manjaro brings. I also run Gnome as my window manager and Manjaro supports Gnome as community release, not as primary, which is XFCE and KDE. That said, Gnome 3.16 was a major release and I'm glad to say that it finally trickled down to Manjaro. I just started discovering all of the new things but from what I see, the desktop looks clean and sharp. I look forward to finding all of the fresh new things in Gnome 3.16. Also, Linux 4.0 is made available at this point. I'll wait on that one. Here's the blog post for the release.

So I decided to start using more Python and less shell for operations and I realized the code I write on my dev machine, be it in my Arch Linux VM or on my Mac, will determine the final output of the script. Meaning, the same script I write on one platform may not work on the other. This is very frustrating because the code I write on my Mac expects v. 2.7.8 of Python and Arch may as well have a different version and there are major changes between minor versions of Python. Going with the same analogy, same script will not work with my Red Hat 6 machine because that has v. 2.6 of Python, really frustrating. I then decided to only write Python3 code, to my dismay, I have to jump through hoops to install Python3 on my Red Hat boxes. There is a software collection repository but I will have to maintain my own mirror for that, I really want to avoid that. So my questions to all is, how do you handle my situation? Thanks

This post is all about gadget envy. I just picked up a pair of bluetooth headphones following a Lifehacker deals post a few days ago. Here's the link to the post. I am by no means an audiophile, however, I was against getting bluetooth headphones for a long while. Recently, it dawned on me that BT headset is the only way to go for me when for the nth time my headphones stopped working in one ear. This deal is great and you may still have time to pick these up. Originally they're $80 and after a $50 off coupon provided at the link, these headphones are a steal for $30. They use the old 2.1 A2DP protocol but so far I haven't had any glaring issues with performance. Off the bat, the fit is very comfortable, something I've had issues with before with over the ear headphones. These do not snug tightly and don't make me feel like my head is in a vice. They come with a nice hard case, included is a 3.5mm cable and use the headphones just like any other wired set or use BT...

I was left out of aftermarket firmware game once I got a new Linksys router as a birthday gift. This is no longer a problem because DD-WRT now supports my E3000. I prefer Tomato firmware myself because I find it more stable but as they say, beggars can't be choosers. I also found that there were three more stock firmware updates available on the Cisco site. I have a new project to do! Tomato DD-WRT --Artem

With recent news of Google collecting SSIDs and passwords while mapping Google Street View, comes this tip from Pauldotcom.com. Apparently, if you plug in the mac address that comes with SSID on a Google map, Big Brother can zero-in on your exact address. Add this to your long list of paranoia. Reconfigure your routers not to broadcast the SSID! --Artem

With all this conficker mumbo jumbo, my security admins restricted blogger.com access. Well, guess what, with it, they took my rights to blog from work. So just to confirm this I yahoo’ed my blog name “Artem’s blog” and found my blog and another Artem’s blog. I had to rub my eyes because topics covered are almost identical to what I would cover, Ubuntu, apps, etc. Turns out there’s another Artem in Ukraine, (I am in the U.S.) that blogs about similar topics. This is pretty funny and I’m kind of proud to have a namesake with similar interests. So everyone, please check out his blog and subscribe. You can also find him on Facebook at Artem Kudymovsky. Here’s a link to his blog. p.s. I just looked through his articles, there’s a post where he says he changed the title of the blog from Artem and Darya;s blog to Artem’s blog, that explains why I didn’t find it before.

Over the past few years I've been shifting away from cable television towards internet. I have about 25 HBO, Starz and Encore channels, yet I find myself watching more and more tv on the net. A big part of my internet tv addiction is podcasts. My 16 gb iPhone holds 6gb of video and audio podcasts at any given time. Podcasts have a great advantage over reading blogs because I can listen and watch them on the go. I don't need an internet connection, I can listen to podcasts while I walk, drive and work. Lately, I've been noticing a trend between most popular podcasts. Shows like Hak5, commandn, dltv, etc. are including a lot of extra chatter in their episodes. For example, a bunch of shows have bloopers at the end. Yes, they're funny and entertaining but a lot of people watch these shows for some specific reason and it's not bloopers! Let's take Hak5 for example. I love their show, I learn a lot, however, once they moved to Revi...

in Firefox address bar type "about:config" no quotes. Hit Enter. Right-click and click new, pick Boolean. Type "config.trim_on_minimize" no quotes, hit OK. Set the value to Boolean and now when you minimize, RAM will be released to the OS.

boot your Windows machine with more than one CPU faster by doing the following: 1. start/run/msconfig 2. select Boot.ini tab 3. select Advanced Options 4. select /NUMPROC and in the newly opened window select how many cores you want to help booting your box. Definitely boots faster on my machine. Cannot provide performance boost but noticed it's faster. I don't know the consequences of the change, so definitely Google it. Thanks.

I went to see "Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?" on Friday night. This film was just what I expected and then some. It felt like I was watching Borat. However, this was a serious film making you ask serious questions. It is unbelievable how much Saudis hate America and how little they know about us. Regardless, I highly recommend to watch this film, you will have a great time because it's funny and serious at the same time. Five stars on my end!!!

If you're reading this blog you probably know me personally and you may be aware of my other venture called ideajax. I write in both places, here and there and sometimes material is so common that I have trouble picking where to post it. So just to cover all the angles I would like to link you guys to that entry that goes over Google Alerts service. I also suggest to subscribe to ideajax blog as well with your favorite RSS reader .

Last night I came across a quick and effective hack for voice mail messages. This is perfect when you work in an office environment and your tone of voice, your speech and other factors may influence the effects of the message. I just tried it and it does indeed work. Long story short, after you leave the voice mail, dial # and it will give you an option to review your message. If you're satisfied, dial # again to send it, otherwise you may delete or append to it. Pretty good hack if you ask me. I can think of many ways where this can come in handy. This can eliminate the need to say words "like", "uhm" and other unnecessary elements. Thanks lifehack .

I don't know what the fascination with cellphones is but I'm definitely an addict. I feel like I've been a good boy for the past few months and I deserve a prize. Recently my phone got stolen and I was thinking what would be the "it" phone for me at that point. If I had to choose, I'd go with T-Mobile as carrier (personal preference) and HTC Wing as the phone of choice. The only gripe I've heard of it was that it's pretty heavy. I love the two thumb devices. It all goes back to Sidekick 2 era. Currently I own a Motorola Q and I hate it. I have another year to go on my contract ::sigh:: So a new phone is out of question. If I didn't have to go with Windows Mobile 6, which by the way is a major improvement over mine, well at least that's what my friend Felix tells me who owns a much better device, T-Mobile Dash , also by HTC. On a side note, those who own a Q may look forward to Windows Mobile 6 upgrade sometime at the end of the year, not tha...