Merry Christmas 2016

2016 has brought quite a bit of excitement to my life. This year I've:

• Sold and moved homes. Finished living in a basement for a period of 1 year. 
• Started a Bachelor's degree program. 
• Was told I could start working from home more (drive into office once a week).
• Found out I was going to be a dad!
• Broke my freaking ankle in three places! (it sucks, and as of right now I still have a cast.)

I've also not posted a lot of new content to this blog in a while But I'm hoping to have some interesting bits of info to talk about in 2017. I'm gearing up for some interesting classes, some possible job changes and maybe getting a few more certifications.

But in the meantime, I wanted to just say Merry Christmas to anyone who stumbles by to read my pointless ramblings and to say this is the last post for 2016. 

Windows Server 2016 EVAL - First Thoughts & Observations

After downloading the official Windows Server 2016 Eval yesterday and spinning up a VM I was pleased to see what I had been hearing for a while that this version would indeed include support for containers:

Woo-hoo! I'll have to play with this some more soon. It should also be noted that Windows Server 2016 now uses PowerShell 5.1 which contains some important new features around JEA & DSC.

I'm excited to start learning. This version appears to have improved on the sweeping changes we saw with Server 2012 so there shouldn't be too much to relearn which is good. As I work with this new version I'll post more.

Grab Basic Network Info from Docker Container

Learning Docker has forced me to learn more about basic Linux tools. One such tool is GREP, or Global Regular Expression Print.

GREP is quite a powerful, yet simple tool for searching text. Docker has lots of text that can be searched when using Docker commands such as docker inspect. Using this command can return a lot of text on your screen. While this can be useful, why hurt your eyes looking for simple network information on a particular container? Enter GREP.

In this example, I'm looking for just the name of the container, it's IP address(es) and MAC address(es). 

 docker network inspect 4136d04999bc | grep 'Name\|IPv4Address\|MacAddress'  

As you can see, I use the command docker network inspect [containerID] and pipe that text to the GREP utility which allows me to search for the regular expression. 

You should see something similar to the following:

docker network inspect + GREP

The above is plain text but since you can do so much with regular expressions, there isn't much you can't find using this example as a starting point.

For more information on using GREP and regular expressions as well as Docker networking, visit the following sites:

Grep - An introduction to grep and egrep. How to search for strings inside of files.

Docker - Work with network commands

Time to Learn Docker

I've been quite busy lately. Not long after my last blog post I was blessed with a great opportunity to finally enter the enterprise IT realm.

Oh the things I've begun to learn and have been asked to learn. Definitely makes scheduling time to enjoy the finer things in life (spending lots more time with the wife, friends & family, fixing up a new house etc.) at little more chaotic at times. But I digress...

I've been asked consider learning all that I can about Docker. So I bought some books, started reading some things online and watched a few videos.

Wow. Big change is coming for IT. Container technology is already upsetting the industry and has already motivated me to learn more and second guess how I currently do things.

As I have time, I'm going to write up some things I've discovered & learned in hopes it will help someone else and as a way to to help me better learn Docker by talking about it with whoever decides to read this blog.

Until next time......