So I’ve kind of been worrying lately about educating my self out of a job because lately reciters are calling and asking if I know something about a thing that I have a certification for and explaining both hands on and education they are kind of shocked to learn that I actually know what I’m talking about and can point out examples of using it. Not all of them but a fair number. Anyway, I like to learn and am now fairly proficient at learning new tech concepts. I was working for a company doing password resets for user logins, mostly, with an MCSA on Server 2012 so being ‘under employed’ for my education level is less stressful than being unemployed. Anyway, I’m kind of trying to take it slow while realizing that I’m easily board and like to have things to do. Also my desk is great so I love sitting here and studying. That said I ordered an art history book and am haggling with a guy over the price on a 3 volume set about the crusades on eBay to occupy my time now that I’ve completely rebuilt my living space haha. Its much more expensive on Amazon but this is what I was talking about: History of The Crusades, 3 Volume Set: The First Crusade, The Kingdom of Jerusalem, The Kingdom of… by Steven Runciman and I was kind of thinking about starting another blog to write about thoughts expressed in those two books so I don’t have to worry so much about being completely overqualified for everything and having to speak with people who don’t believe me and have little motivation to help me acquire appropriate employment. I’m not saying that every person I speak with has this attitude but its kind of a running joke. Besides, I love art and history and it can be very good subject to have lots of knowledge about for dealing with understanding certain situations. This provides a path for education, I plan to keep learning as long as I’m breathing, and possibly wont educate me out of a job. Dont know though. Depends on my mood. Currently thinking I’m enjoying learning Azure and might just do nothing but flip flop between the two subjects. Three subjects, sorry. Anyway, lets get into Azure.

There are a few issues here. First of all it says 3 actions and you can only pick one. Second I’m assuming you have to have a gateway subnet before you can actually create the VPN Gateway? Assuming they simply mean the subnet thats assigned to that gateway. Anyway, lets take a look to verify this with the linked article: Step-By-Step: Configuring a site-to-site VPN Gateway between Azure and On-Premise

After this is created then you actually create the gateway

Then you create the VPN

There is actually another step in this before creating the VPN that the question seems to be skipping.

Ok, so this one is missing a few things. It had the “further information” button but it was totally blank so what the hell are blueprint files? Is this a thing or is it simply a file called blueprint? Anyway, lets start with Google: What is Azure Blueprints?

Just as a blueprint allows an engineer or an architect to sketch a project’s design parameters, Azure Blueprints enables cloud architects and central information technology groups to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implements and adheres to an organization’s standards, patterns, and requirements. Azure Blueprints makes it possible for development teams to rapidly build and stand up new environments with trust they’re building within organizational compliance with a set of built-in components, such as networking, to speed up development and delivery.

So now we have an idea of this but regardless we seem to be just copying files. Anyway, lets check this out: Use an Azure file share with Windows

So its using SMB and requiring a key to login to the Azure share but it doesn’t seem to be encrypting the traffic. To my knowledge SMB doesn’t encrypt traffic but lets find out!

SMB Encryption uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-CCM algorithm to encrypt and decrypt the data. AES-CCM also provides data integrity validation (signing) for encrypted file shares, regardless of the SMB signing settings. If you want to enable SMB signing without encryption, you can continue to do this. For more information, see The Basics of SMB Signing.

Yep, its encrypted. You may have to actually turn it on if your using SMB 2.0 but you shouldnt use that any way. If im understanding it right

So whats ‘Storage Explorer’ Doctor Nick? I’m not sure, lets see if its real: Get started with Storage Explorer

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is a standalone app that makes it easy to work with Azure Storage data on Windows, macOS, and Linux. In this article, you’ll learn several ways of connecting to and managing your Azure storage accounts.

Sure does seem like you would be able to drag and drop doesn’t it? But really, your just logging into your Azure drives through a desktop app rather than a web browser. I wonder if it run’s better in chrome. Probably lol

This makes no sense because 5 mins ago ‘Network Contributor’ did not mean you could ‘Create a Subnet’! is a Virtual Network different than a subnet? The fuck are they talking about here.

ok boomer. I musta had been mistaken about some detail. I’ll get it ironed out.

Basic shell commands for network troubleshooting are so fucking primitive, i cant even. lol, anyway. One would assume that ‘Diagnostics” did not mean ‘troubleshoot’. Anyway, is connection troubleshoot real? Also, the fuck do they mean by VM Blade??? The woooorlllddd may never know. Im not even goin there with that one. I’m not inclined to believe that it is. Troubleshooting connectivity problems between Azure VMs

I have, no fucking idea whats going on here and the Overview is of no help. Lets start with ‘Entity Framework’

The Entity Framework provides the glue between your object oriented code and the SQL Azure relational database in a framework that is fully compatible with your skills and development tools. Integrated into Visual Studio, and part of ADO.NET, the entity framework provides object relational map capabilities that help an application developer focus on the needs of the application as opposed to the complexities of bridging disparate data representations.

dev blogs dont get cited

Just kidding lol Why use the Entity Framework with SQL Azure?

Look, I don’t even know what the API error is!!! How much do you expect me to research this without MORE DATA. …. ok boomers, all right. Connection Resiliency

Connection resiliency automatically retries failed database commands. The feature can be used with any database by supplying an “execution strategy”, which encapsulates the logic necessary to detect failures and retry commands. EF Core providers can supply execution strategies tailored to their specific database failure conditions and optimal retry policies.

Looks like its being used here but the specifics of ‘exponential backoff’ are not here and its probably some SQL stuff that I’m, not getting into today but I atleast have an idea of what the hell this is even if they say what the API error is that appears to be an issue with data insertion.

That’s all for now, may go for a run and then learn some more. Running 8k’s fairly consistently. Much faster than last year. Ran a mile in 10:45 but trying to get to a 60 min 10k eventually so even a 10 min mile isnt fast enough for that at all. Whatever, I’ll figure it out. Fuck having a girl friend lol

It’s been an intresting few days. Lots of solid leads on jobs and lots of the same old same old. Sometimes, its almost as if people ask questions about things they them selves don’t understand while expecting you to know less than them and are suprised by the fact that you know what your talking about whilst not checking your research material or realizing how much effort goes into obtaining certifications. Anyway, I think I’m pretty much done playing this old house and excited to blog from this location.

Yep, totally bought stuff to make scented black candles to sell on etsy because I’m “a lame ass mall goth kid.” Soap making also requires about the same stuff but with using a soap base instead of wax and I do very much like using fancy bar soap for some reason. Judge away as I eat my chicken nuggets and MacNCheese. lol regardless, excited to get back to work on computer stuff. I’m fairly sure I can have the 300 passed before the deadline but no idea if it will still count. Honestly, if I don’t get a job and really “hunker down” i’m sure I can get both of them knocked out. Still waiting to hear what MSFT says about taking one old and one new test though. This would be my preferred method. If you haven’t heard they are retiring the 300 and 301 in September. After having acquired 3 significant certs last year I’m not in a huge rush to get this one knocked out but I can if need be. Anyway, I have had about half a bottle of wine and am ready to see to what we can find in Azure :::says some incompetent gibberish that is some how approved of and generates a response:::

I’ll be real honest, I have no idea what the hell they are talking about which is awesome because it gives me a lot of stuff to learn and read so lets start with some definitions here:

• Microservices – Microservices are a software architecture style in which applications are composed of small, independent modules that communicate with each other using well-defined API contracts. These service modules are highly decoupled building blocks that are small enough to implement a single functionality. The purpose of microservices architectures is to make it easier to develop and scale applications. Microservice architectures foster collaboration between autonomous teams and enable them to bring new functionalities to market faster.
• Service Fabric Cluster – (I have a loose idea on this one) Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers. Service Fabric also addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud native applications. Developers and administrators can avoid complex infrastructure problems and focus on implementing mission-critical, demanding workloads that are scalable, reliable, and manageable. Service Fabric represents the next-generation platform for building and managing these enterprise-class, tier-1, cloud-scale applications running in containers.

It was at this point where I had finished my bottle of wine and realize that I was sleepy and required a good solid nap. After attempting to watch Blown Away with Tommy Lee Jones, realizing I had to pay for it and then switching back to the usual TCM programming. Waking up with a mild case of depression and finding funny memes that made fun of people who where not smart and rude, made my self a bagel and now we are back on track. No closer to finding stable and suitable employment though. Anyway, free photo from Blown Away and I’m back to creating content for the purpose of sustaining my existence in a meaningful fashion.

• Stateful Reliable Service for Routing Service

• Guest Executable for Service Fabric

• Scale Agility – there isn’t a quick definition on this but I’m pretty sure what the mean is the ability to scale up and down quickly.

Anyway, now that we understand what all those terms are, the answer makes sense. There is so much devops stuff in Azure that’s completely new to me. It’s sort of overwhelming but not really. They talk about separation of roles and so forth but its not really that so much as deploying a router as an application rather than a physical bit of hardware. As to why admins are expected to know how to launch and maintain docker chat bots, thats beyond me.

There is an interesting note in the last one that says once they spin up, they dont go down unless memory usage goes down from 50% and the graph is out of order but it spins up to 5 in the second one and then the memory usage/cpu usage never drops enough to let it go to 3 or less.

This is interesting because I’m not sure how Hyper-V works in Azure. Also, if it runs through a gateway is that considered giving it a public address? I would assume so but lets take a look at the network adapter situation for VM’s in Azure. Add network interfaces to or remove network interfaces from virtual machines – per this it seems like you simply add a network adapter? I don’t know if the UI is the same as regular Hyper-V. I would assume but this makes it seem as if that where not that case. I’ll get into that later. ok so per this Configure a private IP address for a VM using the Azure portal the UI is totally different and it looks like you can make a private address and use a public gateway that has NAT. The interesting thing about this is that im assuming this could all still be not connected to the internet without an actual public gateway.

This one is kind of interesting because what its getting at is that as long as there is policy that says that machine is backed up then you cant get rid of that machine basically. I’m left wondering if the Recovery Services Vault is set for only one machine or several machines.

It seems like you have a vault set for one machine which was what the D incorrect answer was kind of hinting at.

This is using OAuth 2.0 and after having gone through Sec+ it becomes really obvious that one of these must use that technology. Clearly D or E would be the choice. The MFA thing kind of throws things off a bit. A and B have nothing to do with this at all. Amazing, how that … works. No where in this does it say that MFA is required under the API conditions list so im really left with D and E

• Bot Framework Portal – this appears to be a portal to login to in order to build a bot.
• Bot Framework Authentication – The Azure Bot Service v4 SDK facilitates the development of bots that can access online resources that require authentication. Your bot does not need to manage authentication tokens. Azure does it for you using OAuth2 to generate a token, based on each user’s credentials. Your bot uses the token generated by Azure to access those resources. In this way, the user does not have to provide ID and password to the bot to access a secured resource but only to a trusted identity provider.

And there we are, this uses OAuth2, holy fuck MSFT isn’t using CHAP or some bullshit that makes no sense and have decided to go with the norm here? Clap!

Anyway, I think that’s all for now and I feel like I’ve learned a ton. Another day in wonka land of nonsense Azure posting.

Well, this is take 2 on this post as I didn’t make a draft of the first one. I’ve been taking it easy lately and kind of focusing on applying for jobs, contact with temp agencies, interviews (I had 3 on Friday! hoping one of the works out) as well as doing some home renovation stuff. I have a thread on twitter seen here, for home renovation stuff. Anyway, I have an amazing super goth bathroom with a shelf in the shower for candelabra lit showers that I’m enjoying immensely and feel free to make fun of me about this haha

As well as a black/white shabby chic looking desk that’s also covered in glitter and candles. You really only notice the glitter as it flickers off the reflection of the flame. It’s pretty cool. My desktop PCs was about 400 dollars used like 5 years ago so I can’t do much more than tweet and, write blog posts, from that machine. Which, other than making music is pretty much all I do anyway. Regardless, it would be nice to have another FL machine. So lets get into this pots. I mean, Post. I thoroughly enjoy Azure but have been so into HGTV while having time off haha. By time off I mean, the world is recovering from a pandemic and people are burning cities down and rioting over police brutality and the ATL police decided they would go ahead and shoot another guy. In the back.

Anyway, lets get Azure..

I kind of covered part of this but I don’t know everything about it. The other thing about these questions is you can sort of guess because the answers on the left go in matching size boxes. honestly, I find it helpful. Anyway, lets look at it step by step. Use the Azure Import/Export service to import data to Azure Blob Storage

So, these steps are honestly kind of random because you are physically shipping a drive to MSFT and they manually import it to a blob for you. They do actually ship the physical drive back to you if you request it though. I feel like I went over this but somehow was confused on the fact that they didnt transfer the data over VPN

Anyway, that’t the bit about returning the drives.

Naturally, one would assume that MSFT wouldn’t pick the underutilized proprietary web language for the most common app language in use. I picked Java just because while considering that the answer probably was .Net

This question is kind of confusing. The second question is easy but I’m not super clear on the math on the first one. So lets start into that. The part I don’t understand here is that I’m not seeing a time deliminator of after (unit of time) at (CPU usage) then create the condition of (spin 2 more VMs up). Perhaps the time limit is a standard notion? I have no idea where to find this info. So according to this Understand Autoscale settings

See where it says ‘past 10 mins’? That’s a configurable setting that I didn’t see in the question. So I think this one has some specific issues regarding it.

The small text in the first one is the important part, its a load balancer and the details of the back end part isn’t what its asking about, its asking how to set up a load balancer that’s connecting several things. Anyway, lets start with the linked article. Actually, lets start here What is Azure Application Gateway?

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 – TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port. Application Gateway can make routing decisions based on additional attributes of an HTTP request, for example URI path or host headers. For example, you can route traffic based on the incoming URL. So if /images is in the incoming URL, you can route traffic to a specific set of servers (known as a pool) configured for images. If /video is in the URL, that traffic is routed to another pool that’s optimized for videos.

And this is the linked article Tutorial: Create an application gateway with path-based routing rules using the Azure portal

This is the part they are talking about and given the options it makes sense but somehow Azure is still slightly confusing. Like its Windows but on Weed lol

I got to mail stuff? Things are called different things! You got routing tables that are all caty wompus!

Well, this one, to be honest, I dont really know what it is and I thought about drinking a cup of coffee before tackling this. Decided I could manage though.

• Azure Backup Server – Back up files, folders, system state using the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent. Or use the DPM or Azure Backup Server (MABS) agent to protect on-premises VMs (Hyper-V and VMWare) and other on-premises workloads
• Recovery Services Vault – Recovery Services vaults are based on the Azure Resource Manager model of Azure, however Backup vaults were based on the Azure Service Manager model. When you upgrade a Backup vault to a Recovery Services vault, the backup data remains intact during and after the upgrade process. Recovery Services vaults provide features not available for Backup vaults
• A backup policy – not really an Azure thing
• A recovery plan – not really an Azure thing

The back up server is actually an application. not entirely clear but it appears to be used for, making back ups. It’s interesting that even in Azure there is so much focus on backup but I supposed they are not writing your code and managing your machines. However, hardware failure does seem to be off the table. Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll probably create another one of these later today.