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SRV DNS records in Terraform and Cloudflare

By Jon Jensen
June 26, 2018

(Photo by David Goehring, CC BY 2.0, cropped)

At End Point we are using Terraform for a few clients to manage their web hosting infrastructure as code (IaC). Terraform is particularly helpful when working with multiple cloud or infrastructure providers and stitching together their services.

For example, for one web application that involves failover from the primary production infrastructure to a secondary location at a different provider, we are using Cloudflare as a CDN to provide caching, DDoS mitigation, and traffic routing in front of virtual servers at DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We decided we wanted to store all of their infrastructure configuration in Terraform, not just what is required for the web application, so we can recreate their entire infrastructure from their Git repository.

This all went fine until we got to their email DNS records. Our client is using Microsoft Office 365 for their email, which requires some SRV records. Terraform’s Cloudflare provider works fine with the universal MX records, but when we first wanted to do this, the Terraform provider for Cloudflare did not support SRV records at all.

Luckily for us, Terraform recently (6 April …

Ecommerce Shakeups: Magento Acquisition and Etsy Rate Increases

By Steph Skardal
June 19, 2018

If you’ve been paying any attention to much in the ecommerce world, there have been a couple shakeups and transitions that could affect how you look at your ecommerce options these days.

Adobe to Acquire Magento

A few weeks ago, it was announced Adobe would acquire Magento in a large acquisition. We’ve seen Magento clients come and go. It used to be the case that the Magento Community version was free and open source, but lacking in features, and the Magento Enterprise version was not free and came with many more features but was closed source.

But, times change, and admittedly I haven’t looked into the current Magento offerings until writing this post. The two current options for Magento are Magento Commerce Starter and Magento Commerce Pro, more details here. These plans are not for small potatoes, starting at $2k/mo. I can see how the cost of this is worth it in lieu of paying a full time developer, but this is not a good fit for small businesses just getting started.

There at not many public details on the acquisition, other than bringing Magento to Adobe’s range of “physical and digital goods across a range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, wholesale, …

systemd: a primer from the trenches

By Ian Neilsen
June 18, 2018

Gears image by Guy Sie, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped & scaled

systemctl: Let’s get back to basics

‘‘Help me systemd, you are my only hope.’’

Sometimes going back to day zero brings clarity to what seems like hopeless or frustrating situation for users from the Unix SysV init world. Caveat: I previously worked at Red Hat for many years before joining the excellent team at End Point and I have been using systemd for as long. I quite honestly have forgotten most of the SysV init days. Although at End Point we work daily on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and BSD variants.

Here is a short and sweet primer to get your fingers wet, before we dive into some of the heavier subjects with systemd.

Did you know that systemd has many utilities you can run?

• systemctl
• timedatectl
• journalctl
• loginctl
• systemd-notify
• systemd-analyze - analyze system
• systemd-cgls - show cgroup tree
• systemd-cgtop
• systemd-nspawn

And systemd consists of several daemons:

• systemd
• journald
• networkd
• logind
• timedated
• udevd
• system-boot
• tmpfiles
• session

That’s a long way from the old SysV init days. But in all essence it’s not that different. The one thing that stands out to me is we have more information …

Instant TLS Upgrades Through Proxy Magic!

By David Christensen
June 14, 2018

TLS shutdowns are real

The payment gateways have been warning for years about the impending and required TLS updates. Authorize.net and PayPal—to name a few—have stopped accepting transaction requests from servers using TLS 1.0. Despite the many warnings about this (and many delays in the final enforcement date), some projects are affected by this and payments are coming to a stop, customers cannot checkout, and e-commerce is at a standstill.

Ideally, getting to security compliance would include a larger migration to update your underlying operating system and your application. But a migration and software update can be an expensive project and in some cases, the business can’t wait weeks while this is done.

End Point has worked with several clients recently to try to remedy the situation by using a reverse proxy to fix this and we’ve had good success on getting payments flowing again.

What is a proxy?

A proxy is a mid-point, essentially a digital middleman, moving your data from one place to another. In two recent client instances, we ended up using nginx (the stack’s webserver) as the reverse proxy, basically running a separate server for just shuttling requests to/​from the …

Systematic Query Building with Common Table Expressions

By Josh Tolley
June 12, 2018

The first time I got paid for doing PostgreSQL work on the side, I spent most of the proceeds on the mortgage (boring, I know), but I did get myself one little treat: a boxed set of DVDs from a favorite old television show. They became part of my evening ritual, watching an episode while cleaning the kitchen before bed. The show features three military draftees, one of whom, Frank, is universally disliked. In one episode, we learn that Frank has been unexpectedly transferred away, leaving his two roommates the unenviable responsibility of collecting Frank’s belongings and sending them to his new assignment. After some grumbling, they settle into the job, and one of them picks a pair of shorts off the clothesline, saying, “One pair of shorts, perfect condition: mine,” and he throws the shorts onto his own bed. Picking up another pair, he says, “One pair of shorts. Holes, buttons missing: Frank’s.”

The other starts on the socks: “One pair of socks, perfect condition: mine. One pair socks, holes: Frank’s. You know, this is going to be a lot easier than I thought.”

“A matter of having a system,” responds the first.

I find most things go better when I have a system, as a recent query …

Liquid Galaxy Supporting the Community During Natural Disaster

By Ben Witten
June 7, 2018

Earthquakes and explosive eruptions are currently rocking Kīlauea’s summit crater, creating concerns for the local community. Fortunately, NOAA’s Mokupāpapa Discovery Center in Hilo is stepping up to educate the greater community with the help of their Liquid Galaxy system, which was created and is supported by End Point.

While there is active volcanic activity and explosive eruptions continue at the Kīlauea summit, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is mostly closed to its nearly two million annual visitors. NOAA’s Mokupāpapa Discovery Center in Hilo is helping to support the community affected by the lava flows and eruption at Kīlauea summit and along its Lower East Rift Zone by hosting Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park Service rangers and interpretive staff.

To lessen the impact on park visitors and to provide a venue to learn about the current eruption, NOAA’s Mokupāpapa Discovery Center in Hilo is hosting a pop-up park center, with daily ranger talks at 10 am and 2 pm, on-site rangers throughout the day, and support of park programming. NOAA National Weather Service meteorologists from the Hilo Data Collection Office are also participating in the daily 10 am briefing to provide …

GDPR is alive!

By Jon Jensen
May 24, 2018

Photo by Julio Albarrán, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that became law a little over two years ago, is now implemented as of 25 May 2018.

Another GDPR article?

Over the past few weeks most of us have been receiving lots of GDPR-related email from companies sending us new privacy policies, so most people have heard at least something about GDPR. But we are finding that some still do not know the impact on their business, and they wonder if it has anything to do with them if they are outside the EU. This article is our attempt to help set those people on the path to finding answers.

I think the first thing to recognize is that the GDPR is a general business matter, not primarily a technical matter. The regulation focuses on business processes and information management (whether computerized or not), and law; it is not actually about software or legal verbiage on websites.

The GDPR is not the kind of law that can be complied with simply by adding a few features to software, changing a few configuration options, or updating a legal notice and moving on with no changes to actual practice.

Some people outside the EU wonder how it is …

Sentiment Analysis with Python

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
May 18, 2018

Photograph by Helena Lopes, CC0

I recently had the chance to spend my weekend enhancing my knowledge by joining a local community meetup in Malaysia which is sponsored by Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC). The trainer was Mr Lee Boon Kong.

Anaconda and Jupyter Notebook

We started by preparing our Jupyter Notebook setup which is running on the Anaconda Python distribution. The installer is 500 MB in size but pretty handy when we started using it.

Anaconda comes with a graphical installer called “Navigator” so the user can install some packages for work. However it did not always work for me on some OSes, so I had to use its command-line based tool “conda”. Conda works like Linux-based package management tools such as apt, dnf, yum, and pacman, so to install a package I would just run conda install <package name>.

Jupyter uses a web browser to allow us to write the code directly in its cell. It is quite helpful for us to debug the code or if we just want to execute it segment by segment independently.

Creating Twitter’s API key

First we need to head to apps.twitter.com.

The following items are needed:

• Consumer Key (API key)
• Consumer Secret (API …