As part of our build and deploy job in the user group project we create a backup of our Azure database before we run any data migrations. If something goes wrong, we do not lose any data and can restore our cloud database to a known good state. It would be a great opportunity to …
Last week I run into the strangest problem with Azure DevOps since we started using it in 2015. From one day to the next, one of our local build servers took massively more time to do its work. Build steps that took 30 seconds now run for 10 minutes, some even for more than an …
Last week we run into a strange problem with our build server. We use Azure DevOps with a local build machine. Everything worked as expected on Monday, yet on Tuesday without any changes on our part the CI job failed with this problem: WARNING: Unable to find version ‘2.7.1’ of package ‘Serilog’. WARNING: Unable to …
Saving the state of a container in Docker is an anti-pattern. You should create your containers in a way that you can throw them away and start with a new one. However, there are some use-cases in which a snapshot of your current container is of great help. One such use-case is creating a snapshot …
The internet moves on and the next big thing that gets dropped is the support for older versions of TLS (Transport Layer Security). If you not already have done so, now would be a good time to check that your server understands TLS 1.2 and disable the older versions of TLS on your web servers. …
All of a sudden, our build agent could no longer communicate with Azure. A failed network change forced us to set a proxy server manually. While most browsers use the system proxy, the build agent did not. For the build agent you need to create a .proxy file with the proxy URL in the root …
Let’s Encrypt offers free SSL certificates to protect the traffic between your website and your visitors. Earlier this year I wrote about the hoops you need to jump through to use those certificates on Azure. This post shows you a way to use Let’s Encrypt certificates on your on-premises servers. The objective of Let’s Encrypt …
A few weeks ago, we run into a strange problem. We were in the middle of our Let’s Encrypt rollout, in which we create a dedicated certificate for each of our domains. Since we run multiple domains on a single web server with only one IP address, we need to activate SNI (Server Name Indication). …
We started a few weeks ago to target .Net Standard in our class libraries. While our applications remain for the foreseeable future on the .Net (Full) Framework, we like to start moving code towards .Net Core. Building our solutions in Visual Studio worked without any problems, but as soon as we try to do that …
There is always that one machine that you cannot upgrade on a current version because some dependencies outside of your control demand that specific configuration. You may postpone the inevitable, but one day you run out of luck. If your box is a web server, that day will come sooner than you think. Out of …