cloudcomputing

I’m a big ServiceNow fan.  I became a bigger fan when they opened up a new Developer Program that included access to a free, personal ServiceNow Instance.  Just go to that link, register, and then ask for your Developer Instance. Having a personal instance is amazing, because “back in the day” you’d have to request access to a shared demo Instance.  The problem with these is that they were often used as sandboxes by lots of other people, completely wrecking your ability to test ideas or see how something would react.  If you wanted to see an out-of-box Instance and compare to yours, you were hosed, these always had modifications to them. Now you don’t have to...

The Problem A few days ago, we started having strange behavior in our Configuration Management Database (CMDB).  When looking at certain classes of Configuration Items (CI) we would see the User Interface (UI) display repeated buttons, and there were no CIs in the List View.  Additionally, if you went to the Tables & Columns module and tried to delete all records from cmdbcinetgear, the UI would report that the table was already empty (but it wasn’t): Worse still, none of the New or Edit… buttons worked on this List View any longer. The Investigation Our partner talked internally, and found another consultant who had seen this behavior previously, he informed us that it occurs within CMDB List Views if...

Today marks another milestone in my professional career.  I’m going to begin writing blog posts about a great new Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) tool called ServiceNow.  We recently contracted with ServiceNow at my employer and I’m thoroughly impressed with the solution.  I’m so impressed that I’ve decided to pursue my certification in various aspects of the ServiceNow solution and have now completed my ServiceNow System Administrator training (in preparation for my Certified System Administrator). This first article is going to be about a solution that I implemented while in my System Administrator training:  Notification of Impersonation Events. What is an Impersonation Event?  ServiceNow provides the ability for someone with the admin role to impersonate another...

You can’t pick up a technical magazine, hang out on Twitter, or read an article on a technology blog without hearing the phrase:  Cloud Computing.  What is cloud computing?  Wikipedia defines it as “Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand“.  That definition is pretty good, but what does it actually mean? Cloud Computing provides businesses and consumers the ability to create on-demand resources and pay only for what you’re using. In the case of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace Cloud servers (or Instances as they call them) you can very quickly provision yourself a server, meeting your personal requirements, use it for a period of...

Update – 20160625 After assisting a reader I realized I should probably post an update to this article.  When I wrote it, Amazon AWS did not have a “Create Image” capability.  Some time ago this was introduced.  The steps below should still work, but they are cumbersome and should be replaced with the following steps: Select your Instance on the AWS Console Click the Actions button Select Image >Create Image Yep, it’s now that easy.  You can also use Bundle AMI on a non-running instance if you wish to upload an AMI to the store.  Keep in mind that if you create an image of a running instance it will not be crash consistent and could have data issues. Original...