AWS Storage gateway and Terraform

So in my last job I was standing up a POC and part of it needed a storage gateway. Now I like to think of myself as semi-intelligent but bloody heck I cannot for the life of me get my head around CFT there is just too much JSON (and I like JSON A LOT more than XML). Step forward Terraform, what took me ~a week in CFT / AWS Console I was able to completely do in Terraform in 2 Days (1 of which was spent struggling with what is to be covered in this post).
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VMWare Integrated Openstack issues

Standing up the environment with the integrated Database is easy enough however if you want to add Active Directory into the mix it gets more fun.
During this I encountered the following issues:

  1. No way to change without blowing away the deployment and re-deploying.
  2. Error messages were often misleading.
  3. AD Structure very Important
  4. Forward Slashes in AD “cn” are BAD!!
  5. Users without a UPN cause issues.

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Compile Raspberry Pi Kernel

update: 2015-02-10: Removed folder sync as was causing builds to fail

Decided to play about with the Raspberry Pi Kernel but setting up the toolchain for a cross compile was a bit of pain not to mention remembering to download everything.
So I put together a Vagrantfile that should auto do it.

Following Variables can be edited at the top of the Vagrantfile:
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CentOS 7 and OpenVPN 2.3.5 (Routed)

Decided to setup a openvpn server on a new CentOS 7 box and it was not exactly straight forward so below are the steps required, this should be enough to get started

On a (minimal) centOS 7 box:

yum -y install gcc rpm-build vim openssl-devel lzo-devel pam-devel wget
wget http://swupdate.openvpn.org/community/releases/openvpn-2.3.5.tar.gz
rpmbuild -tb openvpn-2.3.5.tar.gz

if using a seperate server for as the VPN server:

scp ./RPMS/x86_64/openvpn-2.3.5-1.x86_64.rpm server:/tmp

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MSBuild and 7Zip SFX

The following allows you to package up your build output into a SFX file with custom properties that appear when someone right clicks the SFX and chooses properties.

Useful if you need to create a zip that can be signed but want your company/product information to appear on the SFX.EXE.

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Convert XML and XSL to HTML

Just a quickie. I have a script that outputs an XML file and I use an XSL file to display it but Management wanted HTML files, the thought of having to re-code the output was disheartening to say the least. I then came across “msxsl.exe” it’s a Microsoft tool that takes a XML file and a XSL file and then generates the resultant rendered output in HTML.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=21714

Syntax:
msxsl.exe -o