Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Security is Getting Serious

OK, if we can’t trust computer chips, what do we do? It almost feels like the security war to protect information, or at least keep it private, might be lost before our very eyes in the next decade.

There’s a story about a back door being hidden inside a chip. That’s nefarious, and entirely plausable. After all, how many people, forget about the millions that aren’t technical, how many people in the world can analyze chip designs for back doors? How many people would have to be corrupted, bribed, threatened, etc to make this happen? It’s probably very few.

We have enough issues with back doors or flaws in software. We can’t even patch, upgrade, or change that quickly. Imagine if computer chips in PCs, routers, wifi cards, really any widely used device had a back door implanted? We would have fundamental security flaws for quite some time.

This sounds like a movie plot and I really hope that’s the level of reality here. However, as more companies look to spec their own hardware, especially large cloud vendors, this is disconcerting. After all, inside a company there can’t be extensive reviews of designs for security flaws. Many companies might outsource the manufacturing of their chips to another company. In that case, could employees of the manufacturer look to embed back doors in chips? I’d hope designs are presented, manudactured, and then discarded quick enough to prevent anyone from engineering a back door into the hardware, but I’m not sure how difficult this is, or how much change would be needed to a design.

I suppose there isn’t much any of us can do if this possibility is feasible, but we certainly can keep abreast of security issues and perhaps ensure we use a variety of hardware so that any particular issue doesn’t affect our entire infrastructure.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio .

July 18, 2016
Building locally from VSTS

One of the things that you need with a Continuous Integration server is that ability to build your software on some computer system and verify things work. With Visual Studio Team Services, using Visual Studio online, this seems to be a challenge.

The VSTS team has thought of this and includes the ability to target your builds on a hosted system in the VS cloud, where you don’t need anything installed. However the hosted build agents and servers have a limited amount of software that’s supported. SQL Server isn’t on that list.

However, there is another option. If you go to the control panel for your account, and click the Agent Pools tab, you’ll see something like this.

Notice the “Download agent” link. That’s what you want. As you can see, I’ve been testing and I have agents actually setup and registered on 4 machines. Here I’m going to add a fifth.

Once I download the file, I’ll extract it to see a list of files and folders.

What I first want to do is configure the agent, so I’ll enter ConfigureAgent from a command prompt. Note, I need to do this as an administrator level command prompt.

In my case there are some settings, but I’m overwriting them as I rebuilt my machine. Once I hit Enter, I then get the chance to Authenticate.

After this, the old Agent appears. However, since I’ve rebuilt and rename this machine, I’ll change it. I answer a few more questions about configuring the agent properties. At the end I’ll also authenticate to the Azure cloud once again.

Now that things are configured, I can run the agent. I could set this as a service, but I prefer to know the agent is (or isn’t running) and see the output. I have set this as a service before, and it works fine.

All I have left to do is RunAgent.cmd and I have an agent running locally that takes instructions from VSTS.

If I go back to my control panel, I see a new agent.

I can also trigger a build. I happen to have one setup for a project that points to local instances. Here’s the build definition, which uses the VSTS Extension from Redgate to build a database.

I can click “Queue Build” and a build will start.

I see the build running in the console:

And online in VSTS if I want. The Build Agent sends logs back to the VSTS service as it’s working.

This is a basic way to get a VSTS build working on your local machine with an agent. There is a lot more to configure if you need to, and if you need multiple agents, you can certainly pay for them with a different VSTS plan.

July 18, 2016
MeasureUp 2016

I’m heading down to Austin next weekend for MeasureUp 2016. This is a Microsoft stack conference that looks to help people build custom business software. There are over 20 sessions, most of them devoted to .NET topics. I think I’m more excited to be in some nice company and have the chance to sit in on some interesting talks.

I’ve got the one database talk, Bringing DevOps to the Database. I’ll be looking at some of the ways in which we can change database development to be more agile, to fit in more with the way that most application developers build code.

This builds on work I’ve done in the past, as well as a lot of work that Redgate has done across the last 4-5 years.

If you’re in the Austin area, and you develop software, maybe you want to come down on Saturday for the event. It’s low cost, and the chance to meet with other software developers (and get out of the heat).

Register today for MeasureUp 2016 and come shake my hand.

July 15, 2016
The Remote DBA

I’ll start this week with a question, which I hope some of you answer in the discussion: would you like to, or do you, work at home the majority of the time?

I remember when I worked in a company and needed to leave my desk and walk to a room somewhere to get some work done on a server console. Some of those rooms were cold rooms, which necessitated me keeping a jacket at my desk. I still remember going to a large company that had cables run from the data center to a couple specific workstations near the administrators’ cubes. At one point we installed a remote IP device allowing us to get to the console of any server without having to walk downstairs, or even use RDP, which was just becoming to Windows machines.

That was the end of my visiting servers in person, and since then, the only times I’ve ever really needed to look at a server was when a critical error prevented me from connecting remotely. Even then, at many of the co-location facilities I’ve contracted with, I could call and have an individual go press a power button. These days, with cloud providers and virtual machines, even that is unnecessary.

Those of us that have worked with SQL Server typically understand that we always make a network connection to work with the server. Even when we’re working on the server console, SSMS, SQLCMD, and more all make a “connection” to the database server. Therefore, is it really necessary that we ever work near a particular system?

I’ve been working from home as a telecommuter for about 8 years. My wife worked in technology from home for nearly 20 years. More and more people are doing so, in fact, there was a piece on Fast Company recently that noted more people work from home than ever before. Unfortunately, this study shows that most people end up working more hours, adding a few from home to the 40 or more they spend at work.

That’s not good, but if we can get some work done at home, why not more? I know meetings and face to face time matter, especially in some jobs, but more and more I find that lots of people that need time working alone could do a portion, perhaps a significant portion, of their work away from the office.

So this week, would you like to do more work from home (or elsewhere)? Do you want more virtual meetings, more communication over email, Slack, Skype, or some other tool? Let me know.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio .

July 15, 2016