I had a decent library of documentation, templates, hand-offs, slide decks, etc in my pre-Splunk consulting life (technically, I still have them). It’s nice to be finally getting a decent collection to draw from for my customers in my post-automation consulting life.
you can’t disaggregate
Had a customer recently ask about to disaggregate a {{Splunk}} search that had aggregated fields because they export to CSV horribly. Here’s the thing. You can’t disaggregate aggregated fields. And there’s a Good Reason™, too: aggregation, by definition, is a one-way street. You can’t un-average something. Average is an aggregation function. So why would you …
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stats values vs stats list in splunk
{{Splunk}}’s | stats functions are incredibly useful and powerful. There are two, list and values that look identical…at first blush. But they are subtly different. Here’s how they’re not the same. values is an aggregating, uniquifying function. list is an aggregating, not uniquifying function. “Whahhuh?!” I hear you ask. Here’s a prime example – say …
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about burning bridges
While you should never be the one to burn the bridge of a relationship, sometimes you need to be aware that the other person had placed dynamite around the joints, soaked the whole shebang in gasoline, and is walking around on top with a lit road flare: and you don’t want to be around when …
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manning is doing something similar to my bucket proposal
Manning Publishers has a liveBook offering. And it allows for the type of mini transactions (through their self-hosted “token” system) that I proposed when writing about how I’d dumped Pi-hole last year. Quoting from their recent announcement email Book publishers follow a simple rule: put your content behind a solid paywall. At Manning, we believe …
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never be the one to burn the bridge
But always carry a can of gasoline and some matches – because sometimes you do need to be the one to break the relationship.
it’s all politics
Many years ago, one of my colleagues told me, “if there’s more than two people in the room, there’s politics”. He’s the same guy who told me to never go into a meeting without a prop (his favorite was a cup of coffee (and sometimes a notebook & pen)). I think Jim was wrong. There’s …
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a fairly comprehensive squid configuration for proxying all the http things
After combing through the docs and several how–tos on deploying the {{Squid proxy}} server – none of which really did everything I wanted, of course – I’ve finally gotten to the format below. Installing Squid is easy-peasy – it’s in the standard package repos for the major platforms ({{CentOS}}/{{Fedora}}/{{RHEL}}, {{Ubuntu}}/{{Debian}}, etc) – so just run …
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6 movies
I want you to watch these 6 movies (in this order): {{The Wizard of Oz}} {{Ferris Bueller’s Day Off}} {{Night of the Living Dead}} (1968 edition) {{The Godfather}} {{Pi}} {{Inception}} Watch them with a notebook and pen or pencil handy (yes: use physical writing and recording tools; don’t use your laptop, tablet, or phone). Write …
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ben thompson missed *a lot* in his microsoft-github article
Ben Thompson is generally spot-on in his analysis of industry goings-on. But he missed a lot in The Cost of Developers this week. Here’s what he got right about this acquisition: Developers can be quite expensive (though, $7.5B (in equity) is only ~$265 per user (which is pretty cheap)) Microsoft is betting that a future …
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remembering to forget
As a society, we have forgotten how to forget. We are addicted to storing everything forever. Why? New Atlas had an article recently on the demise of skyscrapers in favor of new ones which starts off, The Great Pyramid of Giza has stood at a height of around 460 feet for 4,500 years, but these days we …
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volvo moving towards waze-like functionality
Shared a TechCrunch story recently in a G+ group I’m in on {{Volvo}} debuting a new service to upload live traffic data from its vehicles to be sent to other Volvos so they can avoid problem areas. Or…a self-built and -hosted Waze. You may recall that I wrote some about these kinds of things starting back …
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don’t use symlinks unless you *know* you can
I first ran into this on Solaris in the context of [then] Opsware SAS (then HP SA, now owned by Microfocus). Bind mounts might be OK … so unless the tarball has symlinks included, don’t use them – they get traversed differently than “real” directories. In short, when directory traversals are done, sometimes it looks …
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a few selected horizon points
Based on some slightly simplified math, here are approximate distances to an uninterrupted horizon from various viewing heights: 6 feet – slightly-above-average human eye level: 3 miles 20 feet – top of the roof of a typical one-story house: 5.5 miles 50 feet – short hill / top of a tree or boom truck: 8.7 …
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on internet sales tax
The debate is raging again as the Supreme Court of the United States is getting ready to make a decision on collecting sales tax for online sales. I’ve read as many viewpoints from supporting and detracting from requiring businesses to collect sales tax from their customers. And my [current] view is that all businesses conducting …
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4 places to check your website’s ssl/tls security settings
Qualys – https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest High-Tech Bridge – https://www.htbridge.com/ssl Comodo – https://sslanalyzer.comodoca.com SSL Checker – https://www.sslchecker.com/sslchecker
hey, virtualbox – don’t be retarded
Ran across this error recently in an Ubuntu guest on my VirtualBox install: VBoxClient: (seamless): failed to start, Stage: Setting guest IRQ filter mask Error: VERR_INTERNAL_ERROR Gee, isn’t that a useful message. Fortunately, there was a forums.virtualbox thread on just this error. The upshot is that this error is actually caused because of a failure …
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more thoughts on `|stats` vs `|dedup` in splunk
Yesterday I wrote-up a neat little find in {{Splunk}} wherein running stats count by … is substantially faster than running dedup …. After some further reflection over dinner, I figured out the major portion of why this is – and I feel a little dumb for not having thought of it before. (A coworker added some …
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splunk oddity #17681 – stats vs table
It’s fairly common to want to table the data you’ve found in a search in {{Splunk}} – heck, if you’re not prettying the data up somewhy, why are you bothering with the tool? But I digress. There are two (at least) ways of making a table – you can use the |table <field(s)> syntax, or …
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a lot of travel
Over the past month, and through the end of March, I’ve done, and will be doing, a lot of travel for work. Nothing I haven’t done before, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had to be onsite for more than a couple weeks at a time – most customer leap at the chance …
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the death of the “car analogy”
With the rise of the “sharing economy”, and companies like Lyft proudly declaring 250,000 people ditched cars in favor of ride-sharing, what will be the fate of the venerable “car analogy“? Heck, what was the common analogy before cars? How will language and colloquial usage change with the [eventual] death of the car as the …
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document what didn’t work
In a recent episode of Paul’s Security Weekly, an off-hand comment was made about documentation: you shouldn’t merely document what to do, nor even why, but also what you tried that didn’t work (ie, augment the status quo). The upshot being, to save whomever comes to this note next (especially if it turns out to be yourself) effort you spent that …
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they asked the right question
Let me compare the experience I wrote about yesterday to another I had the same year with the first customer I was ever sent to – HSBC. Just a couple weeks after starting with ProServe in 2008, I was sent to Chicago to do a final PoC for HSBC. Someone else had done a PoC …
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but, i got them on sale!
Back in August 2008, I had a one-week “quick start” professional services engagement in Nutley New Jersey. It was a supposed to be a super simple week: install HP Server Automation at BT Global. Another ProServe engineer was onsite to setup HP Network Automation. Life was gonna be easy-peasy – the only deliverable was to …
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what if
you blogged as often as you tweeted, facebooked, linkedinned, instagrammed, plogged, pinterested, google plussed, mastodonned, etc? For many of us, that would be 4, 10, 20, 100, or even more blog posts per day. Wonder how differently we would view/utilize social media if we took that approach? Just a thought.