Category: Linux

#DigitalDefence – A Tribute To The Teams

It was fantastic to see / hear / participate in the closing ceremony of the #DigitalDefence Hackathon 2020. If you want to check the whole ceremony including some of locknotes, check it out here.

#DigitalDefence Hackathon 2020 Closing Ceremony recorded by Hackmakers (https://hackmakers.com)

It was great to see who won but also from the judging perspective, who else was in the Top 11 (yes 11, not 10) where we worked with our executive team including Cherie Ryan, Vice President at Oracle and our Regional Managing Director of Australia and New Zealand to pick the winners.

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Teaching How to Provision Oracle Autonomous API Platform and API Gateway

Oracle is adding a secret recipe to all their Cloud Services with a nice touch of Machine Learning. This makes it possible to have the new series of “Autonomous” Cloud Services that are self-driving, self-healing and self-securing. Stay tuned, because we are going to keep listening a lot about them.

In this blog I am going to show you how to provision an Autonomous API Platform environment and then provision and register an API Gateway, running on a separate Oracle Linux VM on IaaS.

This is a graphical view of what I will be doing in this blog:

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Teaching How to use Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI to Provision Oracle PaaS environments

In this blog, I am going to get you started with Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI – A great tool to manage anything API-enabled on any Oracle PaaS Service or Stack. For example, provisioning, scaling, patching, backup, restore, start, stop, etc.

It has the concept of Stack (multiple PaaS services), what means that you can very easily provision and manage full Stacks, such as Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC), that combines multiple PaaS solutions underneath, e.g. ICS, PCS, VBCS, DBCS, etc.

For this, we are going to use a pre-cooked Vagrant Box/VM that I prepared for you, so that you don’t have to worry about installing software, but moving as quickly as possible to the meat and potatoes.

This is a graphical view of what we are going to do:

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Teaching How to use Terraform to Manage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code is becoming very popular. It allows you to describe a complete blueprint of a datacentre using a high-level configuration syntax, that can be versioned and script-automated. This brings huge improvements in the efficiency and reliability of provisioning and retiring environments.

Terraform is a tool that helps automate such environment provisioning. It lets you define in a descriptor file, all the characteristics of a target environment. Then, it lets you fully manage its life-cycle, including provisioning, configuration, state compliance, scalability, auditability, retirement, etc.

Terraform can seamlessly work with major cloud vendors, including Oracle, AWS, MS Azure, Google, etc. In this blog, I am going to show you how simple it is to use it to automate the provisioning of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from your own laptop/PC. For this, we are going to use Vagrant on top of VirtualBox to virtualise a Linux environment to then run Terraform on top, so that it doesn’t matter what OS you use, you can quickly get started.

This is the high-level idea:

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Teaching how to use Vagrant to simplify building local Dev and Test environments

The adoption of Cloud and modern software automation, provisioning and delivery techniques, are also requiring a much faster way to simplify the creation and disposal of Dev and Test environments. A typical lifespan of a Dev environment can go from minutes to just a few days and that’s it, we don’t need it anymore.

Regardless of whether you use a Windows, Apple or Linux based PC/laptop, virtualisation of environments via Virtual Machines, help with this problem, besides it leaves your host OS clean. Vagrant takes VMs to the next level, by offering a very simple, lightweight and elegant solution to simplify such Virtual Machine life-cycle management, easy way to bootstrap your software/libraries requirements and sharing files across your host and guest machines.

In this blog I am going to show you how to get started with Vagrant. You will find it a very useful to quickly create and destroy virtual environments that help you develop and test your applications, demystify a particular topic, connecting to cloud providers, run scripts, etc.

For example, typical scenarios I use Vagrant for include: Dev and Test my NodeJS Applications, deploy and test my Applications on Kubernetes, run shell scripts, SDKs, use CLIs to interact with Cloud providers e.g. Oracle, AWS, Azure, Google, etc. All of this from my personal laptop, without worrying about side effects, i.e. if I break it, I can simply dispose the VM and start fresh.

I can assure you that once you give it a go, you will find it hard to live without it. So, let’s wait no more…

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Exploring GitHub Docker Hub and OCCS Part 4

In my previous post in this series I covered linking GitHub and DockerHub and configuring the environment such that a build of a Docker image was triggered on updates to GitHub. In this final post of the series I will take you through the steps to pull the image from Docker Hub into OCCS in order to run the application. It should be noted that the image built on Docker Hub in my example is only the web tier that contains my Node.js project (APIs and SwaggerUI). The MongoDB component of my OCCS Stack is pulled directly from Docker Hub when my Stack containing the Web Tier and Database Tier services is deployed to OCCS. Continue reading “Exploring GitHub Docker Hub and OCCS Part 4”

Teaching How to use Nginx to frontend your backend services with Trusted CA certificates on HTTPS

Now days with the adoption of Serverless architectures, microservices are becoming a great way to breakdown problem into smaller pieces. One situation that is common to find, is multiple backend services running on technologies like NodeJS, Python, Go, etc. that need to be accessible via HTTPS. It is possible to enable these internal microservices directly with SSL over HTTPS, but a cleaner approach is to use a reverse proxy that front ends these microservices and provides a single HTTPS access channel, allowing a simple internal routing.

In this blog, I am showing how simple it is to create this front end with Nginx and leveraging “Let’s encrypt” to generate trusted certificates attached to it, with strong security policies, so that our website can score an A+ on cryptographic SSL tests conducted by third party organizations.

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Teaching how to create a bootable USB flash drive

  1. Insert a USB flash drive into a running computer.
  2. Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator.
  3. Type diskpart.
  4. In the new command line window that opens, to determine the USB flash drive number or drive letter, at the command prompt, type list disk, and then click ENTER. The list disk command displays all the disks on the computer. Note the drive number or drive letter of the USB flash drive.
  5. At the command prompt, type select disk , where X is the drive number or drive letter of the USB flash drive, and then click ENTER.
  6. Type clean, and the click ENTER. This command deletes all data from the USB flash drive.
  7. To create a new primary partition on the USB flash drive, type create part pri, and then click ENTER.
  8. To select the partition that you just created, type select part 1, and then click ENTER.
  9. To format the partition, type format
    fs=fat32 quick, and then click ENTER.

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Teaching how to configure Virtual Box Network Configuration

You can try NAT based connection and it will work just fine, but you will not be able to access your VM servers externally, unless you map ports. Another option is to use “Bridge Adapter”. Look:

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Teaching How to install Google Chrome on OEL

  • As root, run the following command:

cat << EOF > /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo

[google-chrome]

name=google-chrome – \$basearch

baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/\$basearch

enabled=1

gpgcheck=1

gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

EOF

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