• Articles and Books,  Bushel,  cloud,  Small Business

    My Predictions For How The Cloud Is Leveraged By Small Businesses In 2016

    I published an article with VMblog.com with my (and Bushel’s) predictions for how small businesses will leverage the cloud in 2016. In today’s increasingly mobile world, more and more small businesses are taking advantage of the cloud, as 72 percent indicate they use mobile apps in their business, with roughly 38 percent reporting they could not survive – or it would be a major challenge to survive- without mobile apps, says a recent survey report. Given this trend, here’s a look at what cloud-connected small and medium-sized businesses can expect in the year ahead: Read the predictions here…

  • Apps,  cloud,  Network Infrastructure

    Swiping Through Spam Like A Boss

    Who still says “like a boss?” I guess I did. Get over it. But don’t get over spam. Especially annoying are the ones we know we accidentally signed up for. Because it’s our own darn fault. But luckily, there’s a lot more tools for dealing with bulk mail (solicited or unsolicited) these days. Most modern email clients have the ability to deal with spam. Exchange/Office 365 has clutter and junk. You can build rules on sites. You can use spam assassin on your servers. But, there’s also a nice little app called unroll.me. Once you sign up you’ll have 3 ways of dealing with each message: request removal from a list, mark as rolled up into a…

  • cloud,  personal,  Product Management

    When Product Management Meets Social Justice

    In technology, we often find a lot of cool stuff that, as developers, engineers and yes, even product managers, we think is just plain cool. In agile development, we create epics, where we lay out customer stories and tie them into a set of features; however, while we’re working towards our goals we often find those technical places where we discover we can do something super cool. And we sometimes want to weave those into our stories as features in products simply because we want to make stuff that we’re technically proud of. But should we? Too often we don’t consider what the social ramifications are to features. Time and…

  • cloud,  Network Infrastructure

    New AWS OmniGraffle Stencil

    Before I post the new stencil, let me just show you how it came to be (I needed to do something, which required me to do something else, which in turn caused me to need to create this): Anyway, here’s the stencil. It’s version .1 so don’t make fun: AWS.gstencil. To install the stencil, download, extract from the zip and then open. When prompted, click on Move to move it to the Stencils directory. Reopen OmniGraffle and create a new object. Under the list of stencils, select AWS and you’ll see the objects on the right to drag into your doc. Good luck writing/documenting/flowcharting!

  • cloud,  Mac Security,  Network Infrastructure

    Configure Syslog Options on a Meraki

    Meraki has a syslog option. To configure a Meraki to push logs to a syslog server, open your Meraki Dashboard and click on a device. From there, click on “Alerts & administration”. At the “Alerts & administration” page scroll down to the Logging section. Click on the “Add a syslog server” link and type the IP address of your syslog servers name or IP. Put the port number into the Port field. Choose what types of events to export. This could be Event Log, Flows or URLs, where: Event Log: The messages from the dashboard under Monitor > Event log. Flows: Inbound and outbound traffic flows generate syslog messages that…

  • Active Directory,  cloud,  Consulting,  iPhone,  Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Windows Server

    Dig TTL While Preparing For A Migration

    Any time doing a migration of data from one IP to another where that data has a DNS record that points users towards the data, we need to keep the amount of time it takes to repoint the record to a minimum. To see the TTL of a given record, let’s run dig using +trace, +nocmd to turn off showing the version and query options, +noall to turn off display flags, +answer to still show the answer section of my reponse and most importantly for these purposes +ttlid to toggle showing the TTL on. Here, we’ll use these to lookup the TTL for the https://krypted.com/ A record: dig +trace +nocmd…

  • cloud,  Mac OS X

    One Liner To Install gcloud for Managing App Engine Instances

    I had previously been using the gcutil command. But I cheated a little with the one liner promise to get the new tool, gcloud, installed: curl https://dl.google.com/dl/cloudsdk/release/install_google_cloud_sdk.bash | bash ; unzip google-cloud-sdk.zip ; ./google-cloud-sdk/install.sh The installation shell script is interactive and will ask if you want to update your bash profile. Once run, kill your terminal app and the new invocation will allow you to log into App Engine using the gcloud command followed by auth and then login: gcloud auth login Provided you’re logged into Google using your default browser, you’ll then be prompted to Accept the federation. Click Accept. The gcloud command can then be used to check…