Notes

Featured image for “Qantas to bring inflight Internet to Australia”
23/02/16

Qantas to bring inflight Internet to Australia

Qantas announced today that they expect to commence trials of in-flight Wi-Fi in late 2016 under a partnership with broadband services provider ViaSat. The trial will use a single Boeing 737 aircraft with a rollout across the entire domestic fleet of Boeing 737 and Airbus A330 aircraft. The service will use NBN’s Sky Muster service which provides coverage across most
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20/02/16

Everything you need to know about the Apple versus FBI case

Today’s reading is Everything you need to know about the Apple versus FBI case by Troy Hunt. You’ve no doubt heard of the California judge ordering Apple to assist the FBI in gaining access to the contents of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. Troy provides a great run-down on the background of the case.
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04/02/16

Would the last person in Sydney please turn the lights out?

Today’s reading is Would the last person in Sydney please turn the lights out? by Matt Barrie. An opinion piece into the changing landscape of Sydney – bogged down by ever increasing bureaucracy. So much so that despite living in the middle of Sydney’s Kings Cross that I don’t even go out after dinner anymore. These days I’ll usually host
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Featured image for “Earning bonus points through American Express Local Champion”
02/02/16

Earning bonus points through American Express Local Champion

I’m always on the look out for some points earning opportunities, and one of the hidden surprises I found within the American Express iPhone app was “Local Champion” – a way to earn bonus points at merchants you spend at regularly. I’m a regular at a few local stores and restaurants, and love the idea of getting bonus points just
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Featured image for “Sending call notifications from Asterisk to HipChat”
27/01/16

Sending call notifications from Asterisk to HipChat

HipChat has been discontinued as of February 2019. This post is online for historical reasons only. We run an Asterisk PBX with agents who take inbound phone calls from our various phone queues. We also use HipChat as our internal instant messaging and group chat system. So that agents are aware a call may be headed their way, we have
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Featured image for “A look at AWS Certificate Manager”
22/01/16

A look at AWS Certificate Manager

Overnight Amazon Web Services (AWS) released their AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) product which allows customers to automatically provision, deploy and renew SSL certificates on supported AWS resources (at present they are supported on Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) and CloudFront). One of the biggest challenges I see in organisations over and over again is how to manage and ensure SSL certificates
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Featured image for “Apple Pay in Australia – First Impressions”
19/11/15

Apple Pay in Australia – First Impressions

This morning American Express launched Apple Pay in Australia for those with eligible American Express cards. Eligible cards include those many of those issued by American Express directly – cards issued by banks such as NAB or CBA are not currently eligible. As I have an eligible card naturally I decided to try it out. Setup Setup is simple. I
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Featured image for “DKIM signing in Office 365”
28/10/15

DKIM signing in Office 365

This week I came across a post from Terry Zink (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2015/10/08/manually-hooking-up-dkim-signing-in-office-365.aspx) on how to activate DKIM signing for outbound email messages in Office 365. I’ve been waiting for this feature for quite some time and was keen to get it going for both my personal email (on shaun.net) and my business email (on ewing.net.au). To get started the first thing
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Featured image for “Split DNS on Cisco IOS”
14/09/15

Split DNS on Cisco IOS

At home I have a Cisco 867VAE router that acts as the gateway between my home network and the Internet. It also provides site-to-site VPN between my home network and services I have inside the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. For a while now I’ve been providing DNS resolution using a BIND DNS server running on a home server as
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Featured image for “Speed and latency between AWS Sydney and other regions”
21/08/15

Speed and latency between AWS Sydney and other regions

Since the launch of the AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2) region in November 2012 the majority of my infrastructure has been placed here. There are however times where infrastructure or services need to exist in other regions whether that be for DR or even to bring an application closer to end users. Sometimes these applications need to be replicated either synchronously or
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Notes