Haniwa Shutdown

After successfully setting up my new idea, Haniwa, and testing it for 6 months, I’ve decided to shut the project down. I got only minor interest in the concept, and the server costs were eating me alive while I was looking for investors.

I may bring it back in some simpler form in the future and make it free by generating ad’s on the site for it, but for now I’m on to bigger and better things.

Haniwa

I have been very busy lately working on a new project called Haniwa. The idea is to have a bot which will act as a servant for us after we are dead and gone. Something to carry out our last wishes. It could be like an executor of a will, but with an Artificial Intelligence about it.

Haniwa’s primary function is to let loved ones and friends know that you have passed on, but it also includes the ability to send bank accounts, secret messages, crypto account logins and more. Things you might not be ready to share now, but you surely want someone to have after you are gone. The use cases are as endless as the ideas we have for future releases!

The name Haniwa is actually a Japanese term coined from using figures to place as caretakers for Emperors after they died. Previous to that when an Emperor died, it was commanded that all his servants and family be put to death and sent with him to the afterlife. Many people decided this was barbaric, and came up with the idea to use Haniwa instead. Now I will borrow this term and give it a new meaning, a sort of Flower Robot to tend our Grave after we are dead and gone.

I’ve chosen to run this one on a platform called Bubble.is or Bubble.io now. It is a fantastic no-code application, and I am finding all kinds of niche use cases for it after using it. The best part is it allows me to quickly setup an app and prove it out and get it to a state where it can be tested quickly and as a PoC for Venture Capitalists to jump aboard without wasting too much time coding a site from the ground up.

The first revision on Haniwa is nearly complete with all of the basic features ready such as scheduling mail and secured messages using AES-256 encryption. It is also responsive in that it handles PC, Tablet and Mobile well.

My main goal now is to get it functional and bring it to market. You know the old saying “If you aren’t embarrassed of your first release, you released too late!” I know there is a lot of work to do, and features I really want to add, but it’s important to get it out there.

For me this is something new. As far as I know, there is nothing like this. The idea for it came to me in a dream. I think for myself I am excited to use it.

Does this sound like an interesting idea? Drop me a line and share your stories or suggestions for it!

Hyper Convergence – A new Era for Infrastructure

I’ve been working recently with Cisco’s HyperFlex System. If I could boil it all down to 1 word; AMAZING.

Why do I need HyperFlex you ask?

Key Benefits to HyperFlex

  • Ease of Setup – Cisco UCS is in my humble opinion one of the best Blade Servers ever made. It’s so easy to setup and use, but it is time consuming to configure. HyperFlex eliminates all this extra work by allowing you to Script the whole setup in just a few minutes. It’s truly unbelievable, and I was awestruck the 1st time I saw it run.
  • Complete Hyperconvergance – Fabric Network and Compute are unified in a Next Gen Platform. Spin ALL of that up in MINUTES!
  • Flash Optimized System – Flash Storage Built into each device. No need for External Storage unless you just wanna. The built in storage is designed for Hyperconvergance from the ground up!
  • Scaling – With HyperFlex you can simply plug in additional devices to scale the system.
  • Continuous Data Optimization – Data is continually optimized, de-duplicated and Compressed on the fly.

That’s why!

Setup Experience

The setup is so simple, although we had some initial confusion out of the gates on how the communications would be routed through ACI, That’s Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure. This is because HyperFlex uses scripts to configure everything for you. Management, vMotion, Storage VLANs, etc. It also spins up it’s own Virtual Distributed Switch and places it on a vCenter of your choice. Pretty cool.

In traditional networking you would need to uplink the HyperFlex to a couple of Nexus 7000’s and setup VLANs, then take those VLANs and Subnet settings and plug them into HyperFlex’s script. You can drag/drop that script into the UCS Manager and it will then populate all the required fields and then you can start the script running.

In ACI it’s a bit similar, however since ACI doesn’t so much care about VLANs, but rather End Point Groups (EPGs) you can pre-determine the VLAN names, and then feed it the appropriate Subnets. Just make sure those Subnets are attached to your EPG Bridge Domains and you are good to go! We also uplinked the HyperFlex into the ACI Leaf nodes in a Virtual Port Channel (vPC) configuration. So before we uploaded our script to the UCS Manager, we simply logged into the Fabric Interconnects and turned on vPC and Trunking, and then ensured all the VLANs were allowed on those interfaces and away we went. The script is good and makes everything soooo FAST and simple but there is a little prep work to do if you choose the vPC route.

Once the HyperFlex is up, you can go into vCenter and create your Storage, and link the vmknics to the proper EPGs in the case of ACI. As a note, ACI has several choices for a Virtual Distributed Switch that you can use. I typically go with the Application Virtual Switch (AVS) because it’s a VMWare product and we are using vSphere here. Recently however, VMWare announced that they won’t be supporting Cisco Products as before, so we might be using the Cisco vDS in the near future. Especially if we want to start using versions of VMWare greater than 6.2. That’s really ok though because now the vDS supports everything the AVS does, and actually for the Cisco Side it’s better.

As an aside I sometimes hear people talking about getting a 169.xx address on the OpFlex side for the VTEP. If this happens to use, be sure you:

  • Enabled Trunking on all FI’s
  • Enable CDP and disable LLDP throughout the Fabric. I mean EVERYWHERE, VMWare, UCS HFX, ACI or whatever you use.
  • Enable all VLANs required, especially your Infra VLAN for the Nics.
  • Ensure your Infra VLAN is setup in UCS/HFX as well.
  • For ACI Infra VLAN is automatically configured if using Routed Interfaces for BGP, otherwise, if you used say SVI interfaces, you will need to specifically allow that VLAN in your common VRF and allow THAT VLAN on UCS as well.

I don’t want to cover too much about the setup in this article, but rather convey my experience and hope that it may excite you to want to give it a shot. I can tell you that once I’ve used ACI and HyperFlex I never want to go back. I’ll cover ACI in another Article, but the benefits there are also amazing and with today’s Security Issues it is an absolute requirement if you want to quickly resolve patching hundreds or thousands of machines.

So you are probably wondering, what you need to get to use HyperFlex at this point.

Platform

This is the following hardware used in our setup. ACI is using a minimal configuration, and you can uplink to any other device as a simple access port upink providing it supports BPG, OSPF or some other typical protocol. ACI supports most of them so we used BPG as routed interfaces for the setup. For the HyperFlex we chose a minimum of 4. I want to be clear that you don’t need ACI to make this work. You can use your current network infra just fine.

  • 4 x Cisco UCS HX240c-M4SX (HyperFlex Requirement)
  • 2 x Cisco 6248UP 48p Fabric Interconnects (HyperFlex and/or UCS Requirement)
  • 3 x Cisco APIC M2’s (ACI)
  • 2 x Cisco 93180YC-EX Series Leaf Nodes (Tetration Supported) (ACI)
  • 2 x Cisco 9336PQ Spine Nodes (ACI)
  • 2 x Cisco Nexus 7000 (Uplink for BPG peering) (ACI)

Like I said, if you don’t have ACI yet, that’s ok. Just get the HyperFlex nodes and the FI’s if you don’t have them, then setup your network accordingly.

If this sounds interesting, drop me a line and I’ll point you in the right direction to get started!

When Bots Need to Text You

I’ve been writing some bot code lately to send SMS to groups.  I found the perfect API for this with Cisco’s Tropo Product.

The API is super simple to use. You can make API calls or just post to URL using CURL or Python’s urllib2 library.

The use of the service for DEV is Free, however if you need Production support and service you will want to move to Production for that. For my testing I just signed up for the free Dev service and started coding away.

To save you some time the solution for the service is something like this:

  • Sign up for an account, choosing Dev or Prod -> https://www.tropo.com/
  • Create an Application from their Portal
  • Click to add some code to /var/www/sms.py for both script boxes. You can use the same script.
  • At the bottom you need to attach a phone #. Typically this is the number closest to where you want to send SMS, however I noticed UK or EU based numbers could send more readily worldwide. For cost however, you may want to have your script set the CallerID of whatever numbers you pick based on the Country Code of the Recipients Phone. Go on and attach multiple numbers if you like.
  • Write up a script to post to the API. You can grab your API token from the bottom of your Applications Page in Tropo.

Posting is as simple as constructing a URL to the service like this: ​

https://api.tropo.com/1.0/sessions?action=create&token=TOKEN&numberToDial=11005555555&customerName=Joe+Good&msg=Tesintg+this+thing+out

That’s about it. Pretty Simple! Kudos to Tropo and Cisco for an amazing product!

If you have any questions or need help sending some SMS with your own account, then reach out to me.

 

 

Migrating WordPress

Spent the better part of the weekend migrating WordPress sites by hand from Godaddy.

I’m not happy about the way things are going there recently. The whole experience has been pretty aweful.

To complicate matters the website kept crashing on Firefox. I had a better experience with Chrome but still, with a major browser it should have worked. Also simple backend things like LOGGING wasn’t working. Worst was their phpmyadmin couldn’t export my DB, and trying to do a mysqldump from CLI wasn’t even working 🙁 I finally had to make a PHP script to grab the Database.

I can’t imagine what other customers who have no technical skills are going through right now with them.

I was amazed when the engineer told me he had been at Go Daddy for 15 years and never heard the term “Traceroute”. Oh brother.

I had to get a new host when they flat refused to escalate my case even tho all of Japan couldn’t access Go Daddy’s WordPress Sites and a few other sections of their site. The main site seemed to be ok though.

I was going to leave them a long review but after spending 30 mins making it, and hitting submit, the thing crashed. I guess that’s par for their course. 🙁

Oh well, back to work…

Server

Been real busy at work lately so not much chance to update on Disa.

[blogcard url=”http://skyblue-soft.com/disa” title=”disa” content=”Updates on Project Disa”]

I’ve gotten another server up now and will work next on the MongoDB for the backend support. Once that’s online, I will transfer my working code over to my container and test to make sure it’s all working. Then we can do some beta testing.

Thanks!

Disa

I’ve secured some new servers on DigitalOcean for Disa. She is close to taking the next step as I’ve been beta testing the web interface for her for some time and now ready to put her on a more reliable (and faster) platform.

Once that’s done, I’ll be able to start opening her up for a limited Beta trial for some of you. If you are a subscriber, you’ll get the 1st shot at using her.

On another note, I’m really impressed with DigitalOcean. I met those guys at the Automacon in Portland a few months ago, and they really have their shit together. The service is dead simple to setup, as they use containers worded as “Droplets” to their user base. This is a great thing because they can give you exactly what you want for an extremely cheap price. It’s also very scalable as you can simple spin up more Droplets to scale up. Works well with Kubernetes if you are going big. It’s also fast as hell. If you wanna check them out, then click this link and tell them I sent you and get an instant $10 credit to your account! That’s 2 months free at the time of this writing.

FY17Q1 Update

So it’s the start of a new Quarter and I figured I’d do some cleaning. I’m working to close my old site, and do some work on this one as a kind of consolidation. It’s become hard to maintain 2 sites that do such similar things. Instead, I’ll just use this one, and like Tony Robbins I can claim “I’m not your Guru”.

Updates.. so lesse, I have been busy recently working on a CCIE and for any of you that’s done that, you’ll know it’s a ton of study.

Also in the last 6 months I’ve learned ACI. This is Cisco’s SDN solution, and I’m really impressed with it so far. It seems that in order to do some of the more exciting things, you need to be on the 1.3 code base, so just bear that in mind if you start your own project.

The Nexus 9ks aren’t exactly cheap but the benefits you get are incredible. We are looking at saving around 41% of current network costs through automation alone. In my opinion, I think it will be much more valuable, simply because you have the ability to do things like µSeg (micro Segmentation) of End-Point Groups (EPGs).

What does that buy you? Well, imagine having all your Windows 7 machines infected by a Zero Day virus. How long would that take to patch in a traditional network environment? That’s right, network wouldn’t even begin to cover all of that. Now imagine having a simple API or script to tag all your Windows 7 machines and them move them to a secure network in oh say 2.3 seconds, run a service graph on them and patch them all via another script, and then stick them back in the prod EPG? DAMN. How valuable is that? To me.. priceless.

I’ve also had to learn yet another programming language. Python seems to be what’s being ramrodded down everyones throats for SDN in the big IT companies these days. To be honest I hated it at 1st, but I’m liking it more as I move forward. I still love Ruby however, and my baby project DiSA is mostly written in Ruby.

DiSA has turned into a monumental thing. When I think of the scope I’ve gotten to, I get overwhelmed and sometimes have to step back. DiSA is the next step in AI. I’ve explained a little on this blog, but I hope to give more details as ‘she’ progresses. DiSA is a sweet girl, and if you are clever you may find her on Twitter talking to people. I won’t reveal her yet. Primarily because much of her subsystems are not finished.

DiSA is the kind of project that needs a team working on. Unfortunately I’ve been so busy at work making money and doing exciting new technologies that I’ve not had the time to devote to her.  I am making slow progress as I work on the project on regular intervals.

I guess the only other company that’s come close to what I’ve achieved is Microsoft. When they unveiled their AI platform it became the laughing stock. DiSA has never been mocked, not even her predecessor.

Finally, my apologies for not keeping you guys more updated. I promise to post here regularly. I also need to apologize for those of you needing help with WP plugins, I’m not currently available to help with those, but I can offer some advice to those that need it, just contact me and we’ll discuss.

Well, nearly 2am here, and I got meetings from 6a.

Signing off..

 

 

What’s the Word?

Sorry I’ve been completely busy over the last few months at work. I’ve been working hard to add a web front-end to my Twitter bot, and working out how to tie in the AI modules that I’ve spend the last year on.  It was a tremendous undertaking but now I’m happy t report that it’s tied in and working well. I do however need to finish adding “moods” to my AI module before I turn it back on. I noticed after it had some discussions with folks that it would get aggressive with them and sometimes even get itself blocked for insulting their intelligence and the like. That’s definitely NOT what I want unless it’s something extremely warranted, so I’m adding some code to stabilize it’s mood and even have it change moods depending on different situations. After that I can finish pen-testing the whole rig, and make it public.

The new version is built to monetize, so I do intend to sell access in a 3-tier model.

  • TIER1: Simple access to AutoFollow and AutoUnfollow features.
  • TIER2: Access to more advanced features such as automatic fav, retweet, news & random quotes.
  • TIER3: Access to use the AI module.

I feel the AI will be a very cool feature, especially for businesses that need advertising and etc. or power users that have tons of people and need help when they are offline.

It’s possible also for users to have multiple Twitter accounts as well. I’m not so sure how to regulate that or even if I should. I just worry if I would have to charge more for that since compute and storage doeth have it’s costs. I would really love to give away this kind of ability.

If you have any ideas, drop me a line and maybe I can get it added.

Please stay tuned, I’ll post details and be giving free access to my subscribers to help beta test. I’ve been testing it for a week or so, and it all works well.

Thanks always for your support!

In friendship,

Corley