Month: October 2020

Cheapest Development Environment for Azure Kubernetes Service

I am trying to setup cheapest development environment for Azure Kubernetes journey. I am provisioing this service in East US so all prices are in USD;

az aks create –name myakscluster

This will bring up Standard_DS2_v2 node that cost $106.58 at the time of this writing.

I like to drop it a smaller VM. AKS specification are that every AKS cluster will have at minimum one node pool and node pool require a VM SKU of at least 2 vCPUs and 4GM memory. The cheapest VM at that configuration is Standard_B2s that cost about $30.37.

–node-count 1 –node-vm-size Standard_B2s

AKS uses a Load Balancer and by default the Standard sku @ ~$30/month will be selected. The Basic sku is free, but the Load Balancer sku cannot be changed once the cluster has been created, so we must set it at time of creation.

–load-balancer-sku basic

Disk size defaults to 100GB which for this VM is a Premium SSD p10 @ 19.79/month. Minimum disk size is 30 so we’ll choose the 32GB p4 @ $1.54/month.

The cheapest cluster power shell is;
az aks create -n myakscluster \
–node-count 1 \
–node-vm-size Standard_B2s \
–load-balancer-sku basic \
–node-osdisk-size 32

Hope, this will save some money on compute, storage and networking during development.

Steps to enable MSDTC on Windows Server

These steps can be used on windows Server 2008 r2 and Windows Server 2012 R2

  1. Click Start, click Run, type dcomcnfg and then click OK to open Component Services.
  2. In the console tree, click to expand Component Services, click to expand Computers, click to expand My Computer, click to expand Distributed Transaction Coordinator and then click Local DTC.
  3. Right click Local DTC and click Properties to display the Local DTC Properties dialog box.
  4. Click the Security tab.
  5. Check mark “Network DTC Access” checkbox.
  6. Finally check mark “Allow Inbound” and “Allow Outbound” checkboxes.
  7. Click Apply, OK.
  8. A message will pop up about restarting the service.
  9. Click OK and That’s all.

Reference : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd327979.aspx

Sometimes the network firewall on the Local Computer or the Server could interrupt your connection so make sure you create rules to “Allow Inbound” and “Allow Outbound” connection for c:\windows\msdtc.exe

MAC OS tips

Following are some basic tips for MAC OS;

How to Map a Network Drive / Server to Mac OS X?

From the Mac OS X Finder, hit Command+K to bring up the ‘Connect to Server’ window.
Enter your login/password and click “OK” to mount the network drive.
The drive will now appear on your desktop and in the Finder window sidebar.

How to Force Restart Your Mac?

Press and hold down the Command (⌘) and Control (Ctrl) keys along with the power button (or the ‌Touch ID‌ / Eject button, depending on the Mac model) until the screen goes blank and the machine restarts.

How to add a user to Sudoers in Mac OS X?

sudo visudo
Use the arrow keys to navigate down to the “#User privilege specification” section, it should look like this:

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Put the cursor on the next empty line below the %admin entry and then press the “A” key to insert text, then type the following on a new line, replacing ‘username’ with the users short name of the account you wish to grant privilege to (hit tab between username and ALL):
username ALL=(ALL) ALL

Now hit the “ESC” (escape) key to stop editing the file
Hit the : key (colon) and then type “wq” followed by the Return key to save changes and exit vi
ou should be good to go, you can cat the sudoers file to be certain the file was modified:

cat /etc/sudoers

Q. How to run as root?
sudo -s username