Triggering ECS RunTask from AWS CloudFormation

Inevitably there will come a time where you’re deploying an application on Amazon ECS and you’ll need to fire a single-run command on deployment. This could be something like a database migration or something else that sets up your environment post-deployment that can’t, or shouldn’t be run within your container’s startup sequence (by using entrypoints/bootstrap scripts). You’ll be using CloudFormation (as you should) and you’ll stumble across a bit of an issue..

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Creating users in PostgreSQL

This one has thrown me one too many times, and short of a better place to note this sequence of commands down, I’m posting it here.

postgres=> CREATE USER new_user WITH PASSWORD 'SuperSecurePassword';
CREATE ROLE
postgres=> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO new_user;
GRANT
postgres=> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO new_user;
GRANT
postgres=> GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO new_user;
GRANT
postgres=> \q

Configuring pfSense to work with BT Infinity native IPv6

A quick post this one. I’ve been scouring the internet trying to find the right settings in order to connect up my pfSense to use BT Infinity’s native IPv6 implementation. Finally found the magic combination, which I’m sharing here for future reference, and hopefully help anyone else that might find this post.

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Sending Django’s WSGIRequest to a celery task

There may end up being an instance or 2 where you need access to the initial request object inside a celery task, for want of forming an absolute URL for an email template that you’re generating asynchronously, amongst many other reasons. However you’ll find that the WSGIRequest object can’t be pickled because of bound methods and lambda’s that exist on the object itself. So when you try to send the task, it’ll fall over raising an Exception stating that the WSGIRequest object can’t be pickled.

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Dell Inspiron 5558 Review

I’ve never done a hardware review before (with the exception of the odd Amazon review), so bear with me.

For those who’ve been following my rarely updated blog, I’ve been plagued with laptop issues for a while (here, here, here and here – oddly enough all LCD related) so I figured it was about time I found some sort of reliable work horse that I can just *get stuff done* rather than having to faff around with hardware every handful of months (the last post about LVDS cables covers a significant period of time, and recently started playing up again). So it was about time for a change.

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