https://tomking.xyz/posts/ Recent content in Posts on Tom Tech Notes Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:09:15 +1000 https://tomking.xyz/posts/how-to-survive-this-crazy-ai-world/ Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:09:15 +1000 https://tomking.xyz/posts/how-to-survive-this-crazy-ai-world/ Lets admit it, this is not best time to be a software engineer or for anyone whose job is basically sitting in front of a computer. AI is moving so fast these days, and it’s so overwhelming to a lot of us. Earlier this year, I buried my head in the sand. I convinced myself it wouldn’t affect me that much. I will just sit tight and see it bust just like what happened to Internet around 2000. https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-aws-mcp/ Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:00:55 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-aws-mcp/ The AWS MCP examples are straightforward when you use the default AWS credential chain. My setup was a little different because I sign in with AWS SSO through a script that writes credentials to a named AWS profile. The missing piece was telling the AWS MCP server which profile to use. This post assumes the following are already working: uv is installed. Your AWS SSO sign-in flow already works. Your sign-in script writes valid credentials to a named AWS profile. https://tomking.xyz/posts/config-uv-debug-in-vscode/ Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:43:36 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/config-uv-debug-in-vscode/ Under .vscode folder: Configure your launch.json as below: { "version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { "name": "Python: My uv Debug Test", "type": "debugpy", "request": "launch", "program": "./path/to/python/script.py", "console": "integratedTerminal", "args": ["--arg1", "--arg2"] } ] } Copy uv project dependencies from your pyproject.toml file. dependencies = [ "gql[all]<4", "requests>=2.32.5", "slack-sdk>=3.39.0", "urllib3>=2.6.3", ] In your Python script script.py paste the dependencies to the top of the file and comment it like below. # /// script # requires-python = ">=3. https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-meross-smart-opener/ Fri, 27 Dec 2024 20:56:55 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-meross-smart-opener/ Instead of talking about Kubernetes and Observability, this post is all about home automation. I have long been wanting to make my garage door control a bit smarter than using the usual remotes. Recently I was finally able to found a cheap and easy solution! It all started with this Ozbargain deal. So this post I’ll guide you through the steps I followed to set up Meross Smart Garage Door Opener (MSG100) with Merlin Roller Door (MR555MYQ). https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-newrelic-kubeapp-monitoring/ Sun, 15 Dec 2024 16:49:38 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-newrelic-kubeapp-monitoring/ Running a Python Flask web app on Kubernetes without monitoring is like driving without a dashboard: you won’t know when things go south until they do! Here’s how to set up New Relic APM for your app with minimal fuss (and a little fun). Pre-requisites Python and Docker ready to roll locally. A working Kubernetes cluster (local or cloud-based). A New Relic account (Free tier is fine). Step1: Create the app Python Flask makes building a web app as easy as pie 😜. https://tomking.xyz/posts/my-cka-experience/ Fri, 27 Sep 2024 21:02:22 +1000 https://tomking.xyz/posts/my-cka-experience/ Recently I was able to tick CKA off my TODO list. It’s a interesting and unique exam in compare to other certs I have done in my career. Below are some points I want to share to help out folks who plan to take the exam. Was it hard? The exam is not super difficult in my opinion. My daily job gives me plenty of exposure to different Kubernetes issues. So I was relatively comfortable with the technology itself. https://tomking.xyz/posts/fix-apt-after-k8s-package-repo-change/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:25:27 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/fix-apt-after-k8s-package-repo-change/ Kubernetes legacy package repositories (apt.kubernetes.io and yum.kubernetes.io) have been deprecated and frozen starting from September 13, 2023. It is strongly recommended to use the new package repositories hosted at pkgs.k8s.io. It is also required in order to install Kubernetes versions released after September 13, 2023. The new package repositories provide downloads for Kubernetes versions starting with v1.24.0. Ubuntu packages update will fail with 404 Not Found error if you have Kubernetes packages still point to the deprecated repositories. https://tomking.xyz/posts/fix-docker-container-golang-execute-format-error/ Sun, 10 Dec 2023 20:12:21 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/fix-docker-container-golang-execute-format-error/ Bumped into error Exec format error when tried to run a Go binary within a Docker container. The Go binary is compiled from my M2 Macbook. M2 Macbook uses ARM CPU arch. As a result the Go binary was by default complied with ARM CPU arch, which is different from the Docker image’s amd64 CPU arch. Hence the execution format error. To fix it, you can take two approaches. First, we can build the Go binary within the Docker image. https://tomking.xyz/posts/kubernetes-cluster-fail-to-start/ Sat, 11 Feb 2023 09:27:15 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/kubernetes-cluster-fail-to-start/ After a recent power outage, my Kubernetes cluster failed to come back online. I cannot connect to kube-apiserver through kubectl anymore. Upon checking the controller node, I can see these errors with kubelet service. Feb 03 00:43:06 tom-lab1 kubelet[3475]: E0203 00:43:06.555186 3475 kubelet.go:2422] "Error getting node" err="node \"tom-lab1\" not found" Feb 03 00:43:06 tom-lab1 kubelet[3475]: E0203 00:43:06.656323 3475 kubelet.go:2422] "Error getting node" err="node \"tom-lab1\" not found" In kube-apiserver logs /var/log/container/kube-apiserver-tom-lab1_kube-system_kube-apiserver-2bec70209c1231c69a6501aea951f4ff5bed1996174028cd7e0396b2c4dc34e0.log I can see the errors below. https://tomking.xyz/posts/kubernetes-deploy-metrics-server-with-tls/ Thu, 10 Nov 2022 13:50:40 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/kubernetes-deploy-metrics-server-with-tls/ Metrics-server is one of the most common service deployed in their Kubernetes clusters. It is designed to be used for autoscaling purposes. In my case, I simply want to have a way to easily check my nodes status with kubectl top node. In this post I will walk you through the steps I took to get metrics-server deployed on a local Kubernetes cluster. There are a few interesting issues I bumped into along the way. https://tomking.xyz/posts/pihole-on-kubernetes/ Sun, 16 Oct 2022 18:33:35 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/pihole-on-kubernetes/ In this post I will show how I deployed Pihole onto my local Kubernetes cluster. In compare with some other online tutorials, this deployment saves Pihole configuration onto persistent volumes, so you won’t need to reconfigure everything after pod recreation. By using LoadBalancer, original client IPs are captured correctly in my Pihole instead of seeing everything was from the Cluster IP. If you want to learn how to build your own local Kubernetes cluster, read this post. https://tomking.xyz/posts/remove-notready-pods/ Wed, 12 Oct 2022 16:36:24 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/remove-notready-pods/ Problem You got a pod left in NotReady status due to failed helm chart installation or resource deployment. ➜ ✗ kubectl get pods NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE release-0.11-kube-promethe-admission-create-7j7fz 1/2 NotReady 2 8m1s Tried to remove the pod with kubectl delete pod will just cause the pod to be recreated. Solutions Uninstall helm chart Run helm ls -A to list all current installed charts. Check the chart status. NAME NAMESPACE REVISION UPDATED STATUS CHART APP VERSION tomlab default 1 2022-09-26 09:30:38. https://tomking.xyz/posts/build-full-stack-webapp-using-worker-and-github-pages/ Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:07:31 +1000 https://tomking.xyz/posts/build-full-stack-webapp-using-worker-and-github-pages/ I have been following the COVID situation in Shanghai lately. Intentionally or not, it is surprisingly hard to find a daily chart to reflect the proper case numbers overthere. To solve this problem, I decided to build a webapp just does exactly that: a simple chart the displays Shanghai daily COVID cases that includes both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. The overall design includes a backend API that provides daily numbers in JSON format, and a front-end page that presents the data in the form of an area chart. https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-kubernetes-cluster/ Fri, 28 Jan 2022 17:09:43 +1100 https://tomking.xyz/posts/setup-kubernetes-cluster/ This post I will try to go through the steps I took to build a Kubernetes cluster from scratch. The physcial host is an old Dell Latitude laptop with 8GB memory, which runs VMware ESXi 6.7. The plan is to run 3 nodes on it with one of the VM set as master. Each server runs Ubuntu 20.04. I will skip the VM building steps here as our focus is Kubernetes. https://tomking.xyz/posts/cloudflare-cli-tool/ Sat, 16 Oct 2021 11:50:12 +1000 https://tomking.xyz/posts/cloudflare-cli-tool/ I just wrote a Cloudflare CLI tool called flare 🔥! Check it out from my GitHub repo git@github.com:tomkingchen/cloudflare-cli.git. The tool does some basic queries to Cloudflare API and retrieves information based on the parameters provided. The reason for creating the tool is mainly to help myself to quickly identify information hard to find through Cloudflare dashboard like Firewall rule ID. The current version is to focus on display information only rather than modifing configuration within Cloudflare. https://tomking.xyz/posts/move-to-cloudflare/ Sat, 04 Sep 2021 11:50:12 +1000 https://tomking.xyz/posts/move-to-cloudflare/ I had enough of Google Blogger! It has terrible editing UI for and I constantly receiving SPAM comments for my posts😤. Time to move my blog off to somewhere better! I was thinking to run a Wordpress server. Though I think it’s way cooler to run my blog simplely without worrying about backend infrastructure. After look around, I ended up using Cloudflare Pages to publish my blog. This allows me to write my posts with Markdown and then generate static html pages using Hugo. https://tomking.xyz/2021/08/setup-cloudflare-for-s3-bucket.html Sat, 14 Aug 2021 22:38:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2021/08/setup-cloudflare-for-s3-bucket.html One way to improve website performance is to use CDN to distribute the static contents of your site. S3 is a common place to host such type contents. In this post, I will show you how to publish a S3 bucket using Cloudflare. In fact, the screen shots used in this blogpost is published exactly through this manner. Setup S3 Bucket Permissions This is an optional step which adds a S3 bucket policy to your bucket. https://tomking.xyz/2021/06/setup-cloudflare-for-aws-api-gateway.html Sun, 27 Jun 2021 00:25:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2021/06/setup-cloudflare-for-aws-api-gateway.html In this post I will show how to setup Cloudflare for a Serverless app built with AWS API Gateway and Lambda. For demonstration, I use a simple web app I built (rona.tomking.xyz). The app is hosted in AWS Sydney region. It displays daily Victoria COVID case and that’s it. To use Cloudflare, I have signed up a free Cloudflare account. The first site can be added for free with following features. https://tomking.xyz/2021/06/automate-ec2-instance-security-group.html Fri, 04 Jun 2021 22:47:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2021/06/automate-ec2-instance-security-group.html Ever come into the situation where you need to whitelist a long list of IPs for a EC2 instance? It can be painful to add them manually one by one. On top of that, what if these IPs change on a regular basis? You are in luck! I will show you how to update Security Group rules automatically using Python🐍. Here’s my use case. I got an EC2 instance takes syslog feeds from VMWare’s WorkspaceOne. https://tomking.xyz/2021/05/setup-splunk-universal-forwarder-with.html Fri, 21 May 2021 18:23:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2021/05/setup-splunk-universal-forwarder-with.html One of the best practice to setup Splunk Universal Forwarder (UF) is to encrypt incoming log traffic with TLS. This is especially important if your intake is from an external source on Internet, e.g from a SaaS solution. In this blog I will demostrate the steps to get this setup. First, we will create a public A DNS record for the UF. This is because our UF will be receiving logs from Internet. https://tomking.xyz/2021/02/work-with-google-oauth2-flow-and.html Sat, 27 Feb 2021 21:29:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2021/02/work-with-google-oauth2-flow-and.html I haven’t been very diligent on maintaining this blog. There has been quite a few SPAM comments accumulated on my posts. I am going to turn on moderation to block those. But I need a way to clean all those existing SPAM comments. So over the weekend, I wrote this PowerShell script to do just that. In the end, it will probably take less time if I just manually all the cleanup manually. https://tomking.xyz/2021/02/use-ansible-to-update-splunk-universal.html Sat, 20 Feb 2021 20:55:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2021/02/use-ansible-to-update-splunk-universal.html Today we will look at how to use Ansible to update Splunk UF (Universal Forwarder) configuration. The benefits of using Ansible to achive this are: - Save the hassel to manually modify conf files of syslog-ng and splunk uf. - Codify Splunk UF configuratoin, so they can be version controlled via GitHub. - Automate multiple UFs update without the need to ssh to each single server. - The playbook can also be used to configure newly provisioned Spunk UF. https://tomking.xyz/2020/11/owa-and-ecp-failure-after-install.html Mon, 02 Nov 2020 21:07:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2020/11/owa-and-ecp-failure-after-install.html I recently ran into an issue after update Exchange 2016 from CU15 to CU17. The upgrade installation took around an hour, but was eventually completed successfully according to the Installation Wizard at least. When I tried to access ECP, I got the error below even before the login page shows up. At the meantime, Exchange Management Shell is inaccessible due to the error. In the eventlog, there are lots of 1003 errors relate to MSExchange Front End HTTP Proxy. https://tomking.xyz/2020/06/package-and-deploy-powershell-lambda.html Sat, 06 Jun 2020 05:20:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2020/06/package-and-deploy-powershell-lambda.html Recently I had the need to create a Lambda function with PowerShell 7. The function is to synchronize data between two REST APIs. It’s fairly simple, but does need to use a custom made module. I spent quite bit time to find out how to deploy PowerShell Lambdas with custom modules. Thought might write a guide to help people want to do the same. My script is fairly simple, it gets a list of users from one API and then convert it to a XML format object and export into the target API. https://tomking.xyz/2020/03/test-out-powershell-7-new-features-in.html Sat, 21 Mar 2020 17:59:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2020/03/test-out-powershell-7-new-features-in.html Finally, PowerShell 7 is now GA! As a heavy WSL user, I was keen to see how some of its new features will work in WSL1 (Ubuntu 4.4.0-18362-Microsoft). Below are the tests I have done. Installation in WSL Download the binary from Github repo to a local folder /usr/share/powershell sudo wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.0.0/powershell-7.0.0-linux-x64.tar.gz Untar the file sudo tar xzvf powershell-7.0.0-linux-x64.tar.gz Add path for your shell export PATH=/usr/share/PowerShell:$PATH Reload .bashrc source .bashrc https://tomking.xyz/2019/12/how-to-monitor-aws-direct-connect.html Thu, 12 Dec 2019 13:14:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2019/12/how-to-monitor-aws-direct-connect.html We recently have the need to cutover our AWS Direct Connects to a different vendor. In order to carry out the change, I was tasked to find a way to monitor Direct Connect connectivities to our on premise network from our hundreds of VPCs in AWS. After some discussion with our network engineers and security team, the solution I end up using is to deploy a single EC2 instance into each those VPCs that has a connection to VGW. https://tomking.xyz/2019/10/rdp-to-ec2-with-ssm-port-forwarding.html Sat, 19 Oct 2019 14:05:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2019/10/rdp-to-ec2-with-ssm-port-forwarding.html Say you have a bunch of Windows servers hosted in AWS. The VPC they are in does not have VPN or Direct Connect connect back to your on premse network. Expose RDP port through public IP for these Windows servers is a very good way to get hacked. So how can we securely connect to the servers in this kind setup? Fortunately we have SSM for the rescue. In August, AWS announced a new feature for SSM Session Manager, which allows us to securely create tunnels between your EC2 instances deployed in private subnets and your local machine. https://tomking.xyz/2019/09/vmware-site-recovery-manager-multi-site.html Fri, 06 Sep 2019 23:22:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2019/09/vmware-site-recovery-manager-multi-site.html I was recently involved in a data center migration project, which used VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) as the migration tool to move virtual machines between 3 DCs. The diagram below shows how the setup looks like. The version of SRM is 8.1. [SiteA] <—-> [SiteB] <—-> [SiteC] VMware documentation refer the above scenario as Shared Recovery Site. For each site-pair, you will need to deploy individual SRM server to ensure the SRM Plug-in ID is unique to that pair. https://tomking.xyz/2019/06/hands-up-if-you-have-following.html Sun, 23 Jun 2019 03:06:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2019/06/hands-up-if-you-have-following.html Hands up if you have following setup/practices in your organization: A RDP server (Terminal server) that everyone can jump onto. Apart from the IT admins, some users have local admin rights on the box, just so they can run or configure a particular application. To help troubleshooting an issue, your IT admins often RDP to servers directly from user’s laptop, which the user is a local admin. https://tomking.xyz/2019/05/use-terraform-to-build-server-in-vmware.html Sat, 18 May 2019 00:25:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2019/05/use-terraform-to-build-server-in-vmware.html Like Cloud Formation and ARM Templates, Terraform enables the way of Infrastructure as Code to provision resources in Clouds, but it also works with on premise infrastructures like VMware vSphere and NSX. I recently have been working on the automation of on premise server provision process. The goal is to provision a Ubuntu server on our vSphere 6.5 environment with iPerf3 installed and configured. It surprises me that there aren’t many useful resources/examples out there when comes to using Terraform with VMware. https://tomking.xyz/2019/05/sydney-aws-summit-2019-my-experience.html Fri, 03 May 2019 21:41:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2019/05/sydney-aws-summit-2019-my-experience.html The past week I attended AWS Summit Sydney for three days. It’s such an action packed show. Full of brilliant speakers and tons of interesting workshops. I feel so hard to decide on my agenda. In the end, based on the technologies I am interested in and the relevance to my job these are sessions I went for. AWS Innovation Day Keynote - I was late for it. But still It was good to hear the story of Qantas and learn about how they improve performance and efficiency with AWS. https://tomking.xyz/2019/04/setup-cross-account-s3-access-for.html Sat, 13 Apr 2019 16:05:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2019/04/setup-cross-account-s3-access-for.html I recently run into a scenario, which one of EC2 instances in our production AWS account (IT) need to access a S3 bucket hosted in a separate account (Marketing). The EC2 instance is a Windows 2008 R2 server. It runs Cloudberry Drive to map the S3 bucket as a local volume for a local application to retrieve the data off it. The easiest way to make this work is to create an IAM user in the and assign it with Access keys. https://tomking.xyz/2019/02/the-un-documented-way-to-setup-aws-sso.html Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:22:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2019/02/the-un-documented-way-to-setup-aws-sso.html In this article I would like to share an un-documented way of setting up AWS SSO by using Okta.In case you don’t know what Okta is. It is one of the popular identity management solutions out in the market. It provides Identity as a service through its Web portal and APIs. There is a detailed document provided by Okta walks through steps of how to setting up SAML SSO between your AWS accounts and Okta. https://tomking.xyz/2019/01/infrastructure-as-code-with.html Fri, 04 Jan 2019 22:37:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2019/01/infrastructure-as-code-with.html Recently I was working on a server migration task, which is to move a Windows IIS web server to AWS. The server’s sole purpose is to redirect bunch of the short URLs to some of the most frequently used long URLs. E.g. if user type in “o365/“ in browser, it will be redirected to https://portal.office365.com. Instead of uplifting the whole Windows server to AWS, I have decided to use a Linux server with Apache to replace this box. https://tomking.xyz/2018/12/use-microsoft-graph-api-to-extract.html Sun, 09 Dec 2018 02:40:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2018/12/use-microsoft-graph-api-to-extract.html Recently I was working on automating a process that extracts contents from a Excel spreadsheet stored in Office 365 SharePoint Online. It took me quite sometime to figure out how to get this done. I thought there must be people out there looking for the same thing. Hence here is the post. Based on the requirements, the Excel file needs to be shared among few specified staff. They should be able to modify the spreadsheet with their Office 365 accounts. https://tomking.xyz/2018/11/understand-oauth-and-open-id-connect.html Sat, 17 Nov 2018 19:39:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2018/11/understand-oauth-and-open-id-connect.html IT world is always full of buzz words. “Digital Transformation”, “Automation”, “Blockchain”, “AI”, “Machine Learning”, etc, etc… We like to talk about them all the time, to show that we are not out of touch, we are up to date. Although I have to admit some of those words are used so often yet so few people have the really proper understanding of the actual technologies themselves. I believe OAuth is one of them. https://tomking.xyz/2018/10/how-did-i-pass-aws-solution-architect.html Fri, 26 Oct 2018 12:08:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/10/how-did-i-pass-aws-solution-architect.html This post will be a bit different from my usual technical walk through. I recently passed AWS Solution Architect Professional exam with just three weeks of preparation. In this post, I want to share my experience with the exam itself as well as how I prepared for it. Hopefully you will find it somewhat useful. I booked the exam on 1st Oct 2018. Honestly I didn’t expect myself to pass at that time. https://tomking.xyz/2018/10/deploy-docker-image-with-aws-ecs-part-2.html Tue, 16 Oct 2018 20:34:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/10/deploy-docker-image-with-aws-ecs-part-2.html In Part 1 we uploaded a Docker image to AWS ECR. In this post, we will complete building the ECS Cluster and deploy the container image onto the cluster. Note: The lab I worked on was recreated. The container image was renamed from webfront to testweb. Before we start, you need to understand some ECS basic concepts. Task Definition A task definition describes one or more containers, their relationships, how they should be launched etc. https://tomking.xyz/2018/09/create-powershell-module.html Thu, 27 Sep 2018 02:18:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/09/create-powershell-module.html Recently I came across an issue on our Hyper-V Cluster. One of the VM was stuck in the “Stopping” state. I had to force the VM to shutdown by kill its process on the Hyper-V host. To do so, I first find out the VM’s GUID and then kill the process with the same GUID. Needless to say, the whole process can be achieved with the PowerShell commands below. \# Get the VM GUID and find the process with the GUID $VM \= Get-VM \-Name $VMName \-ErrorAction Stop $VMGUID \= $VM. https://tomking.xyz/2018/09/build-pdc-in-azure-with-dsc.html Fri, 07 Sep 2018 17:19:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/09/build-pdc-in-azure-with-dsc.html There are a lot ARM templates out there can do this. But in this post, we will go through the nitty gritty of using DSC to automate the PDC setup. Before we begin, I assume you already know what DSC is and does. Otherwise, check it out here. First, let’s build a new VM in Azure with these PowerShell commands. In this case, the VM will have direct Internet and can be accessed via Internet directly. https://tomking.xyz/2018/09/install-aws-cli-on-wsl-ubuntu.html Sat, 01 Sep 2018 03:43:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/09/install-aws-cli-on-wsl-ubuntu.html Here are the steps I took to get AWS CLI installed on my WSL Ubuntu. Before we install AWS CLI package itself, we need to get Python package manager pip installed first. Download pip install script. Notice I use –k here, this is because I am running this behind company proxy, the proxy changes HTTPS certificate to its own certificate. Without –k the command will fail. You can leave it out if you have direct Internet access https://tomking.xyz/2018/08/deploy-docker-image-with-aws-ecs-part-1.html Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:00:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/08/deploy-docker-image-with-aws-ecs-part-1.html One of the things I have been working on is to help our developers to containerize their applications and deploy them to AWS ECS. In this post, I will walk through the steps to upload a Docker image to AWS ECR (Elastic Container Repository). As the first step, we need to provision the ECR with CloudFormation template. Below is a simple CFN template written in YAML. AWSTemplateFormatVersion: "2010-09-09" Description: \> Play stack Parameters: RepoName: Default: tomrepo Description: ECR Repoistory Name Type: String \# required ConstraintDescription: must be a name Resources: myrepo: Type: AWS::ECR::Repository Properties: RepositoryName: ! https://tomking.xyz/2018/08/azure-update-existing-rsg-with-arm.html Fri, 10 Aug 2018 14:03:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/08/azure-update-existing-rsg-with-arm.html Do you ever find yourself face this kind the situation: You are told to provision new resources with ARM templates to an existing resource group that already has VMs and vNets built and running. How can you add new subnets and VMs to the resource group without breaking those ones already there? Unlike AWS Cloud Formation Templates, Microsoft ARM Templates do not provide “Update” option for past deployments. In order to modify the existing environment, the usual option is to make the change through CLI, PowerShell or Azure portal. https://tomking.xyz/2018/07/monitor-office-365-outages-with-twitter.html Sat, 28 Jul 2018 05:29:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/07/monitor-office-365-outages-with-twitter.html Office 365 has high SLAs (the latest English version) backed by Microsoft’s excellent Azure Cloud. However, like every other cloud services, there is always the chance for something unexpected to happen. This year April Office 365 had a major hiccup to its service. Its Asia Pacific backend Azure AD authentication went haywire. As a result, users lost access all O365 services. To make it worse, the usual Office 365 monitoring channel: Office 365 dashboard was not accessible due to this fault. https://tomking.xyz/2018/07/over-wall-with-help-from-azure.html Sun, 22 Jul 2018 22:01:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/07/over-wall-with-help-from-azure.html I had a long holiday in China recently. It had been a fun and eyes opening trip. Feels like the whole nation is in the middle of a “technology revolution”. Among all, Internet has become one of the core driving force. But while Wifi beomces a life essential here, the infamous Great Firewall (GFW) is also getting more effective. After tried numbers of paid and free VPN providers, I just could not find a reliable VPN service to simply let me post a picture on Facebook. https://tomking.xyz/2018/06/setup-aws-sso-cli-api-access.html Mon, 25 Jun 2018 17:24:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/06/setup-aws-sso-cli-api-access.html In my last article, I discussed the steps to setup AWS SSO through Azure AD. By using Azure AD app roles, we are able to use our Azure AD accounts to access AWS Console. But with this measure, you will find there is no option in AWS IAM to generate Access Key and Secrete for CLI and API access. Fortunately, we are not the only ones out there have this problem. https://tomking.xyz/2018/06/setup-sso-access-to-aws-console-with.html Thu, 21 Jun 2018 23:05:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/06/setup-sso-access-to-aws-console-with.html As organization acquires more AWS accounts, it becomes quite a challenge for IT to manage the access to all those accounts. Instead of dealing with individual IAM accounts across multiple accounts. We need an identity solution to simplify the user access provision and removal process. AWS itself offers a service called AWS SSO, which allows integrate AWS access with on premise AD through SAML. However, the service does incur charges and will require provision of an AD Connect appliance in AWS, if you don’t already have ADFS in place(Yes, it has the same name as Azure AD Connect). https://tomking.xyz/2018/05/migrate-azure-ad-connect-between-ad.html Thu, 10 May 2018 04:22:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2018/05/migrate-azure-ad-connect-between-ad.html Migrate Azure AD Connect Between AD Forests I was recently involved in an AD forest migration project for one of our customers. As part of the requirements, we need to move the existing AD Connect server to a newly created AD forest. While the process itself is pretty straight forward, I do notice there aren’t many online resource out there detail the whole process. So to make things even easier for the folks out there, I will share the steps I took to complete this AD Connect migration. https://tomking.xyz/2015/11/on-premise-mailbox-user-does-not-show.html Sun, 01 Nov 2015 20:12:00 -0800 https://tomking.xyz/2015/11/on-premise-mailbox-user-does-not-show.html Ran into an interesting issue with one of our Exchange Online customer. Thought it probably worth sharing with the solution I found. The customer has an Exchange Hybrid setup. Recently some of Office 365 Exchange Online users complain they cannot email to a particular on premise mailbox: Paul.Smith@contoso.com. The user bascialy does not show up in Exchange Online GAL. The on premise mailbox is working fine and other on premise staff can send emails to it without issue. https://tomking.xyz/2015/09/enable-local-timestamp-on-office-365.html Mon, 14 Sep 2015 21:01:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2015/09/enable-local-timestamp-on-office-365.html Recently I received some complains from our US users about the timestamp of our SharePoint site hosted in Office 365. The timestamp of the documents and folders on the site are all showing Australia Eastern time for them. It takes me sometime to find out how to allow each individual user to see their local timestamp. This requires some setting changes from the user end. Here is what needs to be done. https://tomking.xyz/2014/06/annoying-office-365-issues-username.html Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:03:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2014/06/annoying-office-365-issues-username.html It happens to me quite a few times. After synced On-Premise AD user objects into Office365 through DirSync, users' specified UPN will not be synced correctly into Office 365. Tried all the suggested tricks from Office 365 forum. None of them worked. I even tried to re-configure our DirSync settings. But the username in O365 just refuse to change. After banging my head on this issue for a few days. Eventually I figured it out, the solution is simply to revoke any O365 licenses assigned to the user. https://tomking.xyz/2014/04/office-365-exchange-hybrid-deployment.html Sun, 06 Apr 2014 23:51:00 -0700 https://tomking.xyz/2014/04/office-365-exchange-hybrid-deployment.html Recently I was working on Exchange Hybrid Deployment for one of our customer. The Hybrid Configuration process itself went smoothly. No errors for HCW. The problems came when I tried to move mailbox to Exchange Online. The migration fails with error: Target mailbox doesn’t have an SMTP proxy matching ‘.mail.onmicrosoft.com’" To check that I ran the following command against the On-premise Exchange. Get-Mailbox “O365 Test5” | fl and check the EmailAddress filed