infrastructure

So this week, I'm writing about something completely different. And not something nice. No, this week, I'm writing about licensing. I hate licensing.

This article explains another dumb issue I ran into. Suddenly - without a warning - a Blazor app running on an Azure App Service starts becoming unresponsive. And this happens without any changes by you. How do we start investigating this?

A working service can stop answering overnight when the IP beneath your AKS ingress changes — and when DNS records or firewall rules depend on that address, the fallout can be immediate and painful!

Ever thought Azure CLI was your reliable sidekick on Windows? Ha! You'd think so, until "Decryption failed: Key not valid for use in specified state" hits you out of nowhere.

Ah, the joys of Kubernetes wrangling – where even a "simple" cert swap feels like herding a bunch of ferrets on meth through a YAML labyrinth.

This article explains how to diagnose and fix a Dell XPS 15 laptop that won't start, indicated by blinking LED lights. It includes a list of blink codes and a step-by-step guide to resetting the BIOS.

This article explains a fix to a - frankly possibly a little bit dumb - problem, where all kubectl commands suddenly throw an error along the lines of "couldn't get current server API group list: Get \"http://localhost:8080/api?

This article explains how you can output the value of a secret variable stored in Azure DevOps. This applies both to secrets stored in a Variable Group, or Pipeline Variables stored as secrets. Is it safe, secure and advisable to do this? No!

Microsoft has just retired the Windows Dev Home experience before it ever came out of Preview -status. And before it ever became that useful. Or even functional, if you ask me.

Just a quick tip I learned the hard way: if you want to host a website on GitHub Pages, make sure to only point the www-subdomain, and not the "naked", apex domain, in case you're using it for email mailboxes.

This article is going live 24th of December in 2024. That's when we in Finland celebrate Christmas (yes - we celebrate on Christmas Eve, so that we can just chillax on Christmas day, either hungover, playing with our new toys, or both).

This article explains an issue that you probably shouldn't run into - unless you're doing something a bit dumb. Just like I was. Or still am.

This article aims to clear the confusion around the GitHub Repository Secrets and explain how to successfully use them in your pipelines for fun and profit! Well, mostly for additional security and pipeline parameterization, really...

Every now and then, you run into a situation where you have a certificate for a website or service, but for one reason or another, you don't have the whole chain.

Alright, so my months-long via dolorosa to achieve a functioning Windows workstation has now cost me a few weeks worth of hours of work and around $4000.

This article explains how to generate a CSR using the OpenSSL CLI toolkit. We'll go through a step-by-step guide to create a private key and a CSR.

This article explains how to get around a sudden issue, where Postman suddenly starts showing you a nondescript and slightly misleading error about a missing URL in your request when you haven't removed any parameters and the request just worked.

This article explains a couple of ways to fix an issue where after deployment, your Azure App Service suddenly starts throwing an error along the lines of "Error occurred during a cryptographic operation. at System.Web.Security.Cryptography.

This article explains how to list all "Environment Variables" (that's pipeline variables, job / stage variables, predefined variables and even local script variables that are mounted on to the agent as Environment Variables) using PowerShel...

This article explains how to fix an error "NoRegisteredProviderFound", which is thrown by az cli's aks commands when you're trying to run pretty much any aks commands in PowerShell/Terminal.

So, I'm an occasional developer (and a frequent scripter), so I occasionally need to, well, develop stuff. And quite often I need Docker for packaging whatever I'm trying to push out there, or possibly to run someone else's containers on my machine.

This article explains in very brief terms - it is Christmas and I'm enjoying my 2-week-long European vacation, after all 😉 - how to make sure your Azure DevOps (YAML) pipelines fire on schedule. Because by default, they won't.

This article explains how to get around new security limitations (did I say "limitations"? I meant "features") in Azure DevOps to make it tolerable to configure your Azure DevOps Deployment Environments.

In this article, I'll share a simple script for a simple use case: removing blobs from a virtual directory structure in a container in an Azure blob storage account.

Anyone still remember Log4Shell? The incredibly easy-to-exploit, zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, that made arbitrary code execution extremely simple and straightforward.