Information Technology
The Phoenix Project is a novel about IT. That was enough for me to get all of my attention. Describing today’s challenges and DevOps practices it’s a brilliant and original idea! I’m even more convinced after reading this book, I’ve also discovered that the authors have been inspired by “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
My ultimate goal as a DevOps engineer is providing solutions focusing on aligning IT systems to company’s culture and business processes. Limiting the time spent on creating bespoke tools and scripts that not all sysops are able to understand or maintain properly. Any custom tool is hard to maintain without a basic software engineering background and it needs a proper design, documentation, QA and all diligence and discipline required along the way.
To achieve this result I need to shift from a developer mindset where is imperative (creating flows) writing programs or automation scripts to declarative, specifying just the desired state of a system in a YAML or JSON files that are a “lingua franca” between devs and sysops providing an up-to-date documentation that can be safely managed on a SCM (like GIT).
Continue reading “DevOps: VMs lifecycle management with Vagrant”
If not well designed or managed, User and Administrator privilege separation for users/system administrators on a Windows OS can be painful for both sides. Indeed, Windows OS doesn’t have a simple and neat management like a SUDO on Linux OS, but settings need to be tailored with GPO or at least with different users.
Regular user accounts (e.g. Domain Users) should not be a member of the local administrators group for a security point of view.
Using separate users: a standard one and an admin member of the local administrators group is at least a good way to mitigate the risk of potential/malicious/accidental damage to the system. It doesn’t matter if most of the today’s threats can deal with the regular user context.
Nothing new if you’re familiar with the least privilege access, if is something you’ve never think about it… Well, I can use a simple effective analogy for allowing user with local admin rights on their workstation.. it’s like to let them run with the scissors all the time… is it worthy or simply asking for trouble?
Continue reading “How To Create a Local Admin Account with Powershell”
There are times where small and simple things can have big impact for a larger audience, one example is implementing a Text To Speech function. Users want to interact with machines in a smarter and meaningful way, the biggest challenge is for developers and engineers to meet that expectation integrating those features in their solutions.
We always give for granted that notifications are visual and users are always staring in front of a monitor waiting for a pop-up window or a new line on the cli to check progress or output of a repetitive operation.
But I think that in many cases text to speech is a good way getting user attention or providing useful instructions. So let’s dive into..
Continue reading “Powershell: Text To Speech in 3 lines of code”