Official Google for Work Blog: Android is ready for work

Google announce Android for Work. Reading the blog post, it is great to see Google head in this direction. A new “Work Profile” in Android 5.0/Lollipop or an “Android for Work app” for the older versions of Android that will basically create a secure container for organisational data. The usual email, calendar, contacts and documents are totally separated out. Even a play store to make it easier for organisations to deploy apps.

What a great development from Google. Read more here: Google for Work Blog

Until next time!

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Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale

This article is an awesome example of why automation is so important for businesses. I know that I personally will do my best to introduce more automation and configuration management tools into the environments I work on. This article is a reminder that without it, terrible things can happen!

Until next time!

Doug Seven

I was speaking at a conference last year on the topics of DevOps, Configuration as Code, and Continuous Delivery and used the following story to demonstrate the importance making deployments fully automated and repeatable as part of a DevOps/Continuous Delivery initiative. Since that conference I have been asked by several people to share the story through my blog. This story is true – this really happened. This is my telling of the story based on what I have read (I was not involved in this).

This is the story of how a company with nearly $400 million in assets went bankrupt in 45-minutes because of a failed deployment.

Background

Knight Capital Group is an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. In 2012 Knight was the largest trader in US equities with market share of around 17% on each the…

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ISAKMP (IKE Phase 1) Status Messages

Recently, I was involved in troubleshooting some VPN issues between two sites. The initial errors we were receiving were not helping us to understand what the problem was. After running the command show crypto isakmp sa we worked out that we weren’t getting the state MM_ACTIVE. Instead were were stuck with one side at MM_WAIT_MSG2 and the other side being stuck at MM_WAIT_MSG3. This was very confusing! Especially when no configuration was changed recently on either side and the VPN was working fine before the incident. We then found this page on the tunnelsup.com website, that clearly explained the IKE Phase 1 stages ISAKMP (IKE Phase 1) status messages MM_WAIT_MSG# – TunnelsUP. This is a great reference for anyone troubleshooting VPN’s and while it did not help us exactly in resolving the issue, it certainly was a great reference that pointed us in the right direction to getting to the root cause.

VPN-Phase1

Until next time!

Atlassian HipChat Now Free!

Today on the train trip into work, I was reading through my normal news feeds and was excited to read the title “HipChat is now free for unlimited users” and so I had to click through to find out more. Atlassian had posted on their HipChat Blog this fantastic announcement. In summary, they are basically offering a free “Basic” version which will allow Group Chat and one to one messaging. There will also be a “Plus” version which will include video calling and unlimited searchable message history.

Check it out for yourselves! https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/05/27/hipchat-is-now-free-for-unlimited-users/

Until next time!