DougieWougie

Supporting the third sector with their technology challenges

A passion for solving problems

Listen, ask, and elicit requirements.

Develop sustainable solutions, and empower ownership.

Document, exploit open-source, and re-use.

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  • Excel – is it a working day?

    Need to know if a date is a working day? Excel has a WORKDAY function which takes a date, adds to it, and tells you the next working day. What about if a specific day is a working day? Assuming the date is in A1:

    =WORKDAY((A1-1),1)

  • Update Plesk Docker Images

    Docker > Settings > Overview > Recreate, making sure that “Rest variable to default” is not checked.

    Finally start.

  • Multipass cloud-init

    Multipass is pretty useful but what a pain this was to figure out, due to Ubuntu’s Node.js package not working with AWS-CDK.

    Multipass lets you manage VM in Ubuntu and can take cloud-init scripts as a parameter. I wanted an Ubuntu LTS instance with AWS CDK, which needs Node.js and python3-venv.

    #cloud-config
packages:
  - python3-venv
  - unzip

package_update: true

package_upgrade: true

write_files:
  - path: "/etc/environment"
    append: true
    content: |
      export PATH=\
      /opt/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64/bin:\
      /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:\
      /usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:\
      /usr/games:/usr/local/games:\
      /snap/bin

runcmd:
  - wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v20.11.1/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64.tar.xz 
  - tar xvf node-v20.11.1-linux-x64.tar.xz -C /opt
  - export PATH=/opt/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64/bin:$PATH
  - npm install -g npm@latest
  - npm install -g aws-cdk
  - git config --system user.name "Dougie Richardson"
  - git config --system user.email "xx@xxxxxxxxx.com"
  - git config --system init.defaultBranch main
  - wget https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
  - unzip awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
  - ./aws/install

    Save that as cdk.yaml and spin up an new instance:

    multipass launch --name cdk --cloud-init cdk.yaml
    Success!

    There’s a couple useful things to note if you’re checking this out:

    • Inside the VM there’s a useful log to assist debugging /var/log/cloud-init-output.log.
    • While YAML has lots of ways to split text over multiple lines, when you don’t want space use a backslash.

    Shell into the new VM with multipass shell cdk, then we can configure programmatic access and bootstrap CDK.

    aws sso configure
aws sso login --profile profile_name
aws sts get-caller-identity --profile profile_name
aws configure get region --profile profile_name

    The last two commands give the account and region to bootstrap:

    cdk bootstrap aws://account_number/region --profile profile_name
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