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Roomba Stuck at ‘Verify password’

You have:

  1. A Roomba vacuum. (I was working with an i-series when I wrote this. Maybe this applies to other models as well.)
  2. A firewall or router between your Roomba and your mobile device. (Maybe the two are on different wifi networks as would be the case if you have a network set aside for IoT devices.)
  3. An iRobot app that gets stuck at Verify password when setting up the Roomba.

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How I Migrated from MediaWiki to Notion

I've written before about how I use MediaWiki for taking notes and as one of my study tools. This has worked well for many years. But a problem started to develop: while I wrote my technical notes in MediaWiki, I wrote my day-to-day notes (books I want to read, notes from podcasts I listen to, and even my weekly planner) in Notion. This meant I had to use different apps for reading/writing in each tool, remember two different markup languages, and couldn't (cleanly) link pieces of content between the two. The final straw was realizing how much more effort I had to expend to maintain my MediaWiki instance; I just didn't have the time or will to keep up with new releases not to mention maintain the server itself.

For these reasons, I decided to move all of my MediaWiki content to Notion and unify all of my notes. But this revealed a new problem: there was no tooling to automate this. So I created my own. Here's how it works.

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Monitoring a Multi-Inverter SolarEdge System

Monitoring a Multi-Inverter SolarEdge System

A friend of mine recently had a solar panel system installed on his acreage. Besides being interesting because of the renewable/green aspect of the project, the system itself—from SolarEdge—is actually highly digital.

  • A mobile app is used for commissioning the system.
  • SolarEdge operates a cloud service which collects telemetry from the system and reports various performance metrics in a user-friendly dashboard.
  • The inverters can connect to the IP network and provide a means to collect telemetry from them directly.

The last point interested me the most because any time a device exposes its data or a control connection, it means there’s an opportunity to integrate it with other software. In this case, I wanted to create my own dashboard to display (near) real-time performance data for the system.

Whereas other blogs and articles on this topic describe how to monitor a single inverter system, this post will describe how I built a performance dashboard for a multi-inverter system.

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Operating Sonos Speakers in a Multi-VLAN Network

In a throwback to the problems I dealt with using AirPlay across VLANs, I recently jumped through similar hoops for Sonos speakers. There are many forum and blog posts out there that describe (or attempt to describe) how to make this work, however all of the ones I read suffered from one or both of these problems:

  1. Their instructions had errors (eg, reversing the upstream and downstream interfaces when talking about multicast).
  2. They don't have a digram of traffic flow! Every network engineer knows that a diagram is a must when trying to understand how two systems are talking to each other.

This post will dive deep on what's happening on the wire when a Sonos controller (eg, your mobile phone running the Sonos app) tries to talk with the players (the speakers) on the network. The focus will be how to make this process work when those two devices are in different VLANs.

What you read below works successfully with Sonos Beam, Sonos Sub, and Sonos Move using the Sonos S1 app.

AWS Cloud Development Kit: Now I Get It

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an "open source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages". When CDK launched in 2019, I remember reading the announcement and thinking, "Ok, AWS wants their own Terraform-esque tool. No surprise given how popular Terraform is." Months later, my friend and colleague Matt M. was telling me how he was using CDK in a project he was working on and how crazy cool it was.

I finally decided to give CDK a go for one of my projects. Here is what I discovered.

How to Implement the Principle of Least Privilege With CloudFormation StackSets

This article was originally posted on the Amazon Web Services Security Blog.

AWS CloudFormation is a service that lets you create a collection of related Amazon Web Services and third-party resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. A typical access control pattern is to delegate permissions for users to interact with CloudFormation and remove or limit their permissions to provision resources directly. You can grant the AWS CloudFormation service permission to create resources by creating a role that the user passes to CloudFormation when a stack or stack set is created. This can be used to ensure that only pre-authorized services and resources are provisioned in your AWS account. In this post, I show you how to conform to the principle of least privilege while still allowing users to use CloudFormation to create the resources they need.

My List of Unusual Things in DNS

This is a running list of unusual data found in the Domain Name System.

Typically, DNS stores name-to-IP (for example, foo.example.net -> 192.0.2.123) and IP-to-name mappings (i.e., the inverse). But, the DNS is arguably the biggest, most distributed key/value store on the planet, making it a great place to stash all kinds of simple data.

How I Installed Tasmota Firmware on a Treatlife Switch

For years now I've had a light switch that can be programmed to turn itself on/off on a schedule. The switch is programmed with the date, time, time zone, and lat/long and then you can create a schedule such as, "turn the lights on at sun set". It works pretty well except when 1/ daylight savings time starts or stops (the schedule doesn't adjust itself) or 2/ the power goes out (bye, bye all programming).

This slight annoyance coupled with my desire for a project I could geek out on lead me to look into software-controllable light switches.

In this post I'll explain how I flashed the open source Tasmota firmware onto the Treatlife 3-way wall switch which in the end allowed me to control the lights via a home automation controller.

Converting From AWS SAM to CloudFormation

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is a framework for building serverless applications on AWS. One of the components of SAM is a template specification. SAM templates would look and feel familiar to anyone who has used AWS CloudFormation to define their infrastructure as code, however they are not completely interchangeable. There are multiple reasons why you might want to convert from SAM to native CloudFormation:

  • You want to deploy the app using CloudFormation StackSets. SAM uses the AWS::Serverless transform in its templates and transforms are not supported by stack sets.
  • You want to deploy the app as part of an AWS Landing Zone (ALZ) account baseline. ALZ uses stack sets as the mechanism to deploy baseline resources and so suffers from the same constraint as the point above.
  • Your operating system of choice isn't documented in the SAM installation instructions and you're uncertain how to install from source or doubtful it will work at all (I'm looking at fellow OpenBSD and FreeBSD users here).

This post will show you how to take an existing SAM application and convert it to a CloudFormation template (CFT). As a CFT, the challenges listed above can be avoided.

Building a Scalable Document Pre-Processing Pipeline

This article was originally posted on the Amazon Web Services Architecture blog.

In a recent customer engagement, Quantiphi, Inc., a member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, built a solution capable of pre-processing tens of millions of PDF documents before sending them for inference by a machine learning (ML) model. While the customer's use case--and hence the ML model--was very specific to their needs, the pipeline that does the pre-processing of documents is reusable for a wide array of document processing workloads. This post will walk you through the pre-processing pipeline architecture.

AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring Walkthrough

I was recently playing around with the Traffic Mirroring feature in AWS. As a network geek, this is right up my alley because as some colleagues and I used to say, "the wire never lies!". Being able to pick packets off the wire for detailed inspection has saved the day many a time. Until Traffic Mirroring came along, it wasn't possible to do that in an Amazon VPC. Below are my notes and considerations for using this feature.

Replicating Elastic File System With AWS DataSync

I recently used AWS DataSync as part of a lab I was building. These are my notes for using DataSync to replicate an Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) share from one region to another.

AWS DataSync is a managed service that enables replication of data between AWS services and from on-prem to AWS. It automates the scheduling of transfer activities, validates copied data, and uses a purpose-built network protocol and multi-threaded architecture to achieve very high efficiency on the wire.

The use case I needed to tackle was replicating an Amazon EFS share in one region to an EFS share in a different region (a one-way replication). (DataSync can also connect to Amazon S3 and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server)

Multicast Routing in AWS

Consider for a moment that you have an application running on a server that needs to push some data out to multiple consumers and that every consumer needs the same copy of the data at the same time. The canonical example is live video. Live audio and stock market data are also common examples. At the re:Invent conference in 2019, AWS announced support for multicast routing in AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This blog post will provide a walkthrough of configuring and verifying multicast routing in a VPC.

AWS ABCs: Granting A Third-Party Access to Your Account

There can be times when you're working on the AWS Cloud where you need to grant limited access to your account to a third-party. For example:

  • A contractor or a specialist needs to perform some work on your behalf
  • You're having AWS Professional Services or a partner from the Amazon Partner Network do some work in your account
  • You're conducting a pilot with AWS and you want your friendly neighborhood Solutions Architect to review something

In each of these cases you likely want to grant the permissions the third-party needs but no more. In other words, no granting of AdministratorAccess policies because it's easy and just works. Instead, adherence to the principle of least privilege.

This post will describe two methods—IAM users and IAM roles—for proving limited access to third-parties.

3 Tools for Getting VMs From Your Datacenter to the AWS Cloud

Here's a simple scenario: you have some Virtual Machines (VMs) in your on-premises environment, likely in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. You want to either fully migrate some or all of those VMs to the AWS Cloud or you want to copy a gold image to the AWS Cloud so you can launch compute instances from that image. Simple enough.

Now, how do you do it?

Can you just export an OVA of the VM, copy it up, and then boot it? Can you somehow import the VMDK files that hold the VM's virtual drive contents? Regardless the eventual method, how do you do it at scale for dozens or hundreds of VMs? And lastly, how do you orchestrate the process so that VMs belonging to an application stack are brought over together, as a unit?

9 Things to Consider When Estimating Time

Often in my career I have to make an estimate about the so-called “level of effort” (LoE) to do a thing.

  • What's the LoE for me to do a demo for this customer?
  • What's the LoE for me to help respond to this RFP?
  • What's the LoE for me to participate in this conference?

The critical metric by which I usually have to measure the LoE is time. People, equipment, venue, materials, and location are rarely ever a limiting factor. Time is always the limiting factor because no matter the circumstance, you can't just go and get more of it. The other factors are often elastic and can be obtained.

And oh how I suck at estimating time.

As soon as the question comes up, “What's the LoE for…", I immediately start to think, ok, if I am doing the work, I can do this piece and that piece, I can read up on this thing and get it done with slightly more time invested, and then yada, yada, yada… it's done!

What I don't account for is the human element. The unexpected. The fact that we're all different and team members will go about their work in their Continue reading

Five Functional Facts About AWS Service Control Policies

Following on the heels of my previous post, Five Functional Facts about AWS Identity and Access Management, I wanted to dive into a separate, yet related way of enforcing access policies in AWS: Service Control Policies (SCPs).

SCPs and IAM policies look very similar—both being JSON documents with the same sort of syntax—and it would be easy to mistake one for the other. However, they are used in different contexts and for different purposes. In this post, I'll explain the context where SCPs are used and why they are used (and even why you'd use SCPs and IAM policies together).

Read on, dear reader!

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