Searching in Splunk

When you are building the search criteria, click the field and value in the search result to add it to the search.   Wildcard character * (asterisk) one or multiple characters Exact phrases Use ” (double quotes) Search for quotes \” (use backslash to escape quotes if you want to search for quotes) Keywords in the search …

Splunk installation

Install Splunk Navigate to the Splunk website at splunk.com, In the upper right corner select the Free Splunk button, If you don’t yet have a Splunk account, register to create one, otherwise log in, Select the Free Download in the Splunk Enterprise frame, Select the tab with the operating system of your machine. Linux The simplest …

Get AWS SSL Certificate resource ids from existing Load Balancers

To launch an Elastic Load Balancer ( ELB ) with an existing SSL certificate using Terraform, you need to specify the AWS certificate resource id. If you have already uploaded the certificate and attached it to an existing load balancer, the following AWS CLI command will display it in the command window. MY_PROFILE is the name of the …

Create a server image with Packer

Packer is a free, open-source application from Hashicorp. It can generate a server image based on an existing one, and configure it for your special needs. You can use the generated image when you launch a server instance in the cloud or on your local workstation. Install Packer Download Packer from https://www.packer.io/downloads.html, Unzip the downloaded ZIP …

Convert PEM files to PPK to use them in PuTTY

When you create a key in AWS you can download it one time in PEM format. To use it in PuTTY, the free SSH and Telnet client, you have to convert it to PPK format. To install PuTTY, see the Terminal Emulator section in Recommended utilities for your workstation To convert a PEM file to PPK Open a …

Chef Attributes

Chef attributes are global variables that are available for every cookbook on the node. There are multiple formats to declare and use an attribute. For important notes on the syntax, please see Undefined method or attribute error in a Chef recipe. To override the value of an attribute that is defined in another cookbook, use the …

Prevent the auto-termination of stranded instances in RighScale

When you launch an instance with RightScale Self Service, and the Chef cookbook execution fails, the instance goes into “stranded” mode. By default RightScale Self Service terminates the stranded instances, so there is no way to remote into them and read log files to find the cause of the problem. To keep stranded instances running in RightScale …

Error waiting for instance (i-…) to become ready: unexpected state ‘terminated’, wanted target ‘running’

When you launch a server instance with Terraform, sometimes the error message does not contain the underlying cause. When the cloud provider cannot complete the request, many times Terraform displays a generic error message: Error waiting for instance (i-…) to become ready: unexpected state ‘terminated’, wanted target ‘running’ To find the root cause of the …

Upgrade a server on an AWS EC2 instance with minimum risk and downtime

When you need to upgrade an application on an AWS EC2 instance with minimum downtime, there are many options. Upgrade an EC2 instance Stop the application, so users don’t make more changes, Create a backup of the database (snapshot of the RDS instance), Create a backup of the server (backup image of the EC2 instance), …

Find the AWS AMI that a RightScale server template is using

When you use RightScale to launch servers in the cloud, you want to use the same base image to test your Chef cookbooks in Test Kitchen. Packer by Hashicorp is a utility to create custom server images based on cloud images. You supply the image ID and other configuration parameters to create a new custom image. …