Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2019

Using Vagrant to simplify building Virtual Machines

Oracle’s VirtualBox software is a key tool in software and website development, but can be complicated to configure. Vagrant simplifies the process and enables developers to repeatably build and scrap near-identical Virtual Machines (VM). This post will create a Ubuntu 18.04 Virtual Machine with a local directory mounted on it to make it easier to code on.

How to Send Log Files to AWS CloudWatch - Ubuntu

AWS CloudWatch allows you to collect log files such as the Apache2 access or error logs from your AWS EC2 instances. This is especially useful if you have a scaling group of instances behind a load balancer. Rather than connecting to each instance and manually searching the logs with grep, CloudWatch centralises the logs into one log stream, allowing you to search all your log files from one place.

What do these error codes mean?

The other day whilst using a very popular website I came across a series of 404 unavailable page messages. I didn’t think much about it at the time but on reflection it made me wonder how many people actually understand what different error codes mean? Hands up, I only know a few and I work in the website monitoring sector. To most, it just means a weird IT message when things go wrong.

Magecart Monthly: Record £183m fine for British Airways.

Read the latest news on Magecart attacks! We’ve trawled the web for the latest news of data breaches, including updates on previous attacks. Now featuring insider insights from our own Security Researcher! Latest attacks: New! Major Attack on US Medical Debt Collection company American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA). Their payment portal was compromised for 8 months from August 1st, 2018 to March 30th, 2019.

How to manually build a Ubuntu 18.04 Virtual Machine server with Oracle VirtualBox

This post will describe how to manually build a Ubuntu 18.04 Virtual Machine (VM) server using Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualisation software. Being able to build simple, expendable VMs is extremely useful, whether you’re writing software, building websites or just wanting to learn about Linux servers. We need to be able to SSH onto the server from our host machine to make access easier. To gain SSH access we therefore need to forward SSH’s port to our host.