Part of the CTO job is being conversant in a broad set of technical domains. I’ve never been a data engineer, but a current project has need, and thus I’ve been getting up to speed.
Spent some time on a flight this morning reading Amazon Redshift documentation, and found this beauty:
How helpful, Amazon: a best practice for loading data is to first learn how to load said data? Wouldn’t have guessed that. I wonder what other wonders of wisdom await me…
From time-to-time I have need to connect to VPNs, usually when doing work directly for one of my government partners. For a reason that utterly escapes me, Cisco hides its AnyConnect client behind a login that requires a license. And it’s a heavyweight install to boot. Ugh. I’d rather use a CLI; enter openconnect.
It can be a bit tricky to get the parameters right, so I put together a little helper script that abstracts some details, not the least of which is storing the VPN password in the local keyring for quick retrieval.
Posting it here for posterity. Enjoy!
You know when you’re trying to clean up a bunch of old AWS accounts but there’s no way to bulk close them so you have to click them one at a time and then click close and then copy and paste the account number to confirm and then there’s also a rate limit so you have to wait a minute between closures and then you hit a “10 account closures per 30 days” limit and no you can’t increase the quota says the documentation but you talk to support anyways and then they try to increase the quota but they can’t either so they suggest you log into each of them as root one at a time to close and you say “fine” but then the root email passwords are missing in your repository of credentials so you try to go through the forgot password flow but the root email address has two plus signs in it and no Exchange configuration you can think of to try seems to be able to accept such an email address and so you’re just outta luck…
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!
UPDATE: So you finally get a shared mailbox set up with a carefully crafted alias that will receive email from the offending email address at least from your personal gmail account so in theory its working but then you retry the forgot password flow on the AWS login page and there’s a CAPTCHA and the first 4 times you try to solve it you get it wrong and then finally you get it right and the page claims it’s sent you password reset instructions to via email but you’ve waited 15 minutes and nothing has come through and yes you’ve checked the junk folder and what the hell am I doing with my life this is not what I dreamed a career in technology was going to be like and why can’t it involve more of the Property Brothers??