Joe Poniatowski

This article was originally published by Triond on their web site ComputerSight. I thought it was time to reprint it here, so it appears below in its entirety.

Configuration Management (’CM’ hereafter) means a lot of different things to different people. Weighty tomes have been written describing the goals, policies, procedures, benefits, pitfalls, and a […]

As a Configuration Manager, I’m always looking for ways to improve the automation of the builds and deployments of my company’s applications. We use scripts to compile the apps, replace certain token strings with environment-specific values, and copy the new executable code out to the production servers. Ideally, we should not have to […]

Use Secure Shell (SSH) to establish safe, encrypted internet connections through a firewall. With this method, you don’t have to open additional ports through your firewall in order to access external email accounts, access usenet newsgroup servers, and multimedia streams, which leaves your internal network more secure. This means you don’t have to worry about […]

Well, I still haven’t solved the earlier problems (see other posts in this category), but now I’m having a new problem. One of the Windows servers we’ve had OpenSSH running on for quite some time suddenly seems have issues. It will stop accepting connections. The message in the sshd.log is always some […]

I recently ran a training session teaching some Configuration Management (CM) personnel some of the basic UNIX/linux shell commands, along with some of the common ways Secure Shell (SSH) utilities can be used to move application code around during deployments. I created an outline for the class, which is reproduced below. In no […]

The “Could not create an instance of the CmdLib object. Please register the Microsoft.CmdLib component.” error message was because of certain web server extensions that weren’t installed. I think the SQL Server Reporting Server needed to be installed. In any case, we’re past that now.
Current problem: we’re running the […]

Recently it was decided at the large State government facility where I work that Secure Shell (SSH) would be used to facilitate the deployment of application software to the servers. This approach has a number of advantages. All data transfers are encrypted. Key pairs can be used to automate the authentication, so […]

While waiting for Associated Content to publish the Charity Music article (something they’ve now agreed to do), I wrote a quick little overview of SSH and published it on Helium, where it’s now rated #1 of 2. What is SSH? The nice thing about Helium is that your submissions are published more or less […]

Configuration Management: 4 Key Concepts
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