I recently had to do some tinkering in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Compute Instances and the Key and Secrets Management in Oracle Vault. I wanted to be able to replicate AWS EC2 instance capability to access secrets based upon the instance’s permissions without requiring any usernames, passwords, tokens, etc… to be stored on the instance itself. In AWS, I already know how to do this via IAM Roles and Policies. Before we begin, I’m assuming that you already have created a Vault and Secret that will be accessed. You can reference the Oracle Cloud documentation on creating secrets and vaults here. I also assume that you have a Compute instance created that is running some type of Linux. Mine is running OL8. ...

I needed to make sure I had two users in an Amazon Redshift cluster (readonly and readwrite). I needed to make sure their permissions were set appropriately so the first step was to first see what their permissions were on the schema and then the tables. First we check their schema permissions with the below query that makes use of the has_schema_privilege function: SELECT u.usename, s.schemaname, has_schema_privilege(u.usename,s.schemaname,'create') AS user_has_create_permission, has_schema_privilege(u.usename,s.schemaname,'usage') AS user_has_usage_permission FROM pg_user u CROSS JOIN (SELECT DISTINCT schemaname FROM pg_tables) s WHERE (u.usename = 'readonly' OR u.usename = 'readwrite') AND s.schemaname = 'public'; The query above filters on the specific users and schema I’m checking against. You are welcome to customize this query to look for all users and/or all schemas. This query results in the below permissions on the public schema for these users: ...

I started messing around with my WordPress by first adding in a layer of security in Adding Nginx in Front of WordPress. After putting Nginx in front of my WordPress, I decided that I would further secure it by also Building a Static WordPress. That’s great and all but maybe it was time to make Nginx give me some performance gains rather than just some security controls. That is exactly what we’re going to do in this blog post. Now that Nginx is sitting in front of WordPress, we can use it to control some of the performance aspects. ...

It’s time to get back to some lighting as I spent a little time enhancing my setup that I left off configuring in Making the Lights Dance. In my Building the RaspberryPi Christmas Light Box post, I blamed a friend for starting me down this path. Once again, I’m blaming a different friend for causing me to wander down the LED lighting road. This friend saw some of my posts regarding the simplistic lighting box I created, and they suggested that I tinker with WS2811 lights. Let the tinkering begin! ...

From that previous post, you’ll note that I had a bunch of unanswered questions. Some of those questions might remain unanswered. By the time you get to the end of this post, you might be able to address them yourself. I’m going to focus on automating static WordPress updates whenever a new post is published. This similar logic should be possible to replicate when it comes to needing to update static content based upon WordPress and WordPress plugin updates. ...