Practical, hands-on guides from our database, cloud and software teams — the same kind of write-ups we lean on internally, shared for anyone running these platforms themselves.
OpenSSL on Windows Made Simple: Create a PFX Certificate from PEM Files Introduction When you work with SSL/TLS certificates on Windows—especially for platforms like Azure Key Vault, IIS, Application Gateway, Load Balancers, or Kubernetes—you’ll often receive certificates in PEM format (for example: .pem, .crt, fullchain.pem). The challenge: many enterprise platforms require a PFX (PKCS#12) file
Read article ›How to Set Up Secure Cross-Account AWS DBA Access Using IAM Roles (Step-by-Step) Managing databases in AWS often requires DBAs to access customer environments securely—without sharing passwords, long-lived keys, or granting excessive permissions. A common and recommended approach is to use AWS IAM roles with cross-account role assumption. This guide walks through a practical, secure
Read article ›How to Enable and Verify SQL Auditing for Azure SQL Managed Instance If you’re running workloads on Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) and need to track who changed what data, when it happened, and from where, SQL Auditing is the right place to start. This guide walks through how to: Why SQL Auditing matters
Read article ›How to Create Databases and Users in Azure Database for MySQL (Flexible Server) Managing users and databases in Azure Database for MySQL (Flexible Server) is similar to standard MySQL, but with one important difference: Azure is a managed database service, so some “superuser-style” permissions (especially global grants) are intentionally restricted for security and platform stability.
Read article ›How to Mount Azure File Share on an Azure Linux VM (SMB/CIFS) — Step-by-Step Azure Files provides fully managed cloud file shares that you can mount on Linux just like a normal network filesystem. This is super handy for shared application configs, logs, backups, and cross-VM shared storage without managing an NFS/SMB server yourself. In
Read article ›Renewing SSL Certificates on HAProxy Running on an Azure VM (Step-by-Step) If you’re running HAProxy on an Azure VM, sooner or later you’ll need to renew your SSL/TLS certificate. When that renewal is handled cleanly, users see nothing. When it’s handled poorly, you get outages, browser warnings, or failed health checks. This guide walks you
Read article ›Fixing uuid-ossp on PostgreSQL 15 (RHEL 8): “extension is not available” If you’ve ever tried to enable UUID generation in PostgreSQL and hit this: …you’re not alone. This is one of those cases where PostgreSQL is telling the truth: the database is fine, but the server OS package that provides the extension files is missing.
Read article ›How to Check Where PostgreSQL Stores Its Database Files (Step-by-Step) When you’re troubleshooting disk usage, planning backups, investigating performance issues, or validating a migration, one of the first questions you’ll ask is: “Where are my PostgreSQL database files actually stored?” PostgreSQL is very transparent about this—if you know where to look. In this guide, we’ll
Read article ›The Practical Beginner’s Guide to Git Clone, branch, commit, push, merge — and deploy with Docker Git is the most popular version control system for tracking code changes, collaborating with others, and safely delivering features without breaking your main codebase. This guide walks you through a real-world Git workflow: ✅ Create or clone a repo✅
Read article ›Fix “Key not valid for use in specified state” (WinError -2146893813) on Windows A practical guide for Azure CLI, MSAL token cache, and DPAPI decryption failures Summary If you see this error on Windows: Decryption failed: [WinError -2146893813] Key not valid for use in specified state …it usually means your app (often Azure CLI) is
Read article ›Install WordPress on Ubuntu 24.04 With Free SSL (Let’s Encrypt) This guide shows how to install WordPress on Ubuntu 24.04 using Apache, PHP, and MySQL — then secure it with a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. It also includes two common production needs: blocking search engines until launch and increasing WordPress upload size. What
Read article ›How to Identify Active Transactions and Running SQL in SQL Server When a SQL Server database becomes slow, blocked, or starts showing signs of transaction log growth, one of the first things a DBA wants to know is: Which transaction is running, who started it, and what SQL is it executing? That is exactly what
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