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A Do-It-All Attempt at IT Framework & Governance



Top Framework Requirements:

1. Incident Management (Helpdesk Software)
   1. The objective of Incident Management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price.
      1. Processes Include:
         1. Identifying the incident’s root cause
         2. Develop & document a peer reviewed & approved action plan
            1. Consult Change Management
         3. Calculate required implementation time
         4. Execute action plan & prove it’s completeness via QA
         5. Catalog documentation for future incident reference
            1. Support Problem Management
      2. Provide a helpdesk ticket request system to centralize & track bug reports

1. Problem Management (Proactive QA & Application Review)
   1. To minimize the impact of problems on the organisation. Problem Management plays an important role in the detection and providing solutions to problems (workarounds & known errors) and prevents their re-occurrence.
      1. Regular review of application & infrastructure operation
      2. Application dependent server software upgrades
         1. Testing software package migrations
         2. QA evaluation of application before & after
         3. Documenting the software’s changelog & reason for upgrade

1. Release Management
1. Implement changes to IT services which consider all aspects of a change including planning, designing, documenting, building, continuous integration, unit testing, training, communications and deployment activities.
   1. Utilize Continuous Integration and application unit testing
      1. Identify & resolve potential application bugs prior to QA review
   2. Establish a proven & stable method of deploying approved application builds for release.
   3. Document procedures for each release
      1. Puppet configuration changes
         1. Required webserver configuration changes
         2. Application global config changes
      2. Configuration deployment in sync with application releases
      3. Document complete Roll-Back procedures
         1. Support Incident Management
      4. Perform adequate QA evaluations of application post-release
         1. Maintain a checklist evaluating all application functionality
            • Newly implemented functionality
            • Known related legacy functionality
            • Review remaining unknown functionality
         2. Append to a collection of any release related incidents
            1. Future support of Incident Management



1. Service Desk
   1. Provide a strategic central point of contact for customers and support the Incident Management process by providing an operational single point of contact to manage incidents to resolution.
      1. Manage bug reports
      2. Identify levels of incident criticality supporting Incident Management
      3. Graph & Report on incident trending
      4. Support Capacity Management requirements to meet expected service levels


1. Service Level Management
   1. Plan, coordinate, negotiate, report and manage the quality of IT services at an acceptable cost.
      1. Providing & maintaining a highly-available, high demand infrastructure on the Amazon Cloud supporting
      2. Combine aspects of Capacity Management & Service Desk to evaluate regular review of IT resource availability.



1. IT Financial Management
   1. Provide budgeting, accounting and charging services to control, manage and recover IT cost and spend.
      1. Evaluate different operational cost comparisons
         1. Support cost effective decisions for IT purchases
      2. Estimate & evaluate application & traffic resource demands
         1. Establish padding for a potential business growth factor
            1. Growing storage needs
            2. Customer traffic demands
            3. Application dependencies for high-availability
            4. Legacy hardware end-of-life cycles


1. Capacity Management
   1. The discipline that ensures IT infrastructure is provided at the right time in the right volume at the right price, and ensuring that IT is used in the most efficient manner.
      1. Maintain current IT employee workload padding for unexpected event handling
         1. Developers - Identifying Incident extent, development and deployment of application hot fixes
         2. QA Team - Provide and extent of on-demand availability for unexpected incident testing and release.



1. Availability Management
   1. Optimize the capability of the IT infrastructure, services and supporting organization to deliver a cost effective and sustained level of service availability that meets business requirements.



1. IT Service Continuity Management
   1. Support business continuity management functions by ensuring that IT services can be recovered in the event of a major business disruption within required timescales.





1. IT Security Management
   1. To prevent the occurrence of security-related incidents by managing the confidentiality, integrity and availability of IT services and data, inline with business requirements at an acceptable cost.
      1. Regularly update server & application software
         1. Apply software security patches
            1. Vulnerabilities as discovered & released
            2. Maintain forward compatible application code
      2. Restrict SSH access to Public Key authentication only
         1. Maintain a repo & puppet template for authorized_keys
         2. Restrict SSH to non-standard port (i.e. 2222)
            1. To reduce brute SSH probe password attempts
         3. Maintain STRICT firewall configurations, for only necessary services.
      3. Utilize centralized authentication management, such as
         1. LDAP Authentication
      4. Utilize AWS Route53 for ultimate DNS stability
      5. Perform regular external vulnerability evaluations
         1. PCI Compliance scans
         2. McAfee HackerSafe audits
         3. XSS Scripting Vulnerabilities
         4. SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

Google Android - AppInventor

Well, we knew this day would come. Our friends at Google have finally developed a WYSIWYG GUI for Android Development that runs in your browser!

I've already built and tested 4 Apps for my phone. I've also registered for the Android Developer Network, and I'm all set to publish meaningless apps to the Android Marketplace. 

Check out these screenshots of the interface:

Simple drag n' drop interface for adding controls and elements to the view port. 

The Blocks Editor provides an additional drag n' drop, puzzle-like interface for constructing logical flows and event handlers in your app. 

Is it me, or does it seem like SkyNet is only a few months away at this point?

Cisco ACE 4710 Load Balancer - CLI Integration

MySQL Based Apache Config Generator

In an industry where websites are built from scratch, pumped into a home-brewed e-commerce/content management system and tore back down 3 months later, an ever increasing burden existed to constantly be modifying Apache configurations. Anytime more than one person is involved in modifying a file, there's potential for integrity corruption.

After scouring the internet for some such existing solution, (and lacking the ability to switch to another web server), I quickly found the need to develop a managed and "idiot proof" method of configuring Apache Virtual Hosts.

The Back End:

A database table of "vhosts" was created to store all the individual host configurations such as ServerName & Alias, DocumentRoot, Logging Levels & Locations, and the ability to perform trackable redirects to other sites/domains. A lot of instances existed where upper management and/or clients would decide to buy 50 different misspelled versions of their product's name, and ask on a Friday afternoon, if they could be ALL setup, tracked independantly, and redirected to the original website, in time for distributed media ads that were scheduled to run the next morning. 

A template file was used to set the basic layout of the vHost config block.

Tags such as {DOCUMENTROOT} and the like, were used to define the layout positions in the file. The database was queried for all active records and the config file rebuilt and reloaded each time qualifying changes were made to the database. Servers each ran independently of each other on 15 minute crontab entries. Each server would query the queue for a "RUN NOW" flag identified by their hostname. If found, the script would then begin creating the new config file from the entries returned from the database query.

After the content for the new config file was built, the parent processor would then backup the original file, and perform an "apache2ctl configtest" on the new one. Standard Out was buffered and parsed via string comparison to determine Apache's test results. If any error messages were detected, the new config would be abandoned, the old restored, and the admins notified of the issue and offending vhost record. This allowed a fully automated solution, while still protecting the web server from Apache failing to start due to config file errors.

The Front End:

We also quickly discovered the need for an easy interface to enter all these configurations. Ultimately our goal was to start training other "less technically inclined" people to use it and "share" the programming workload. (Especially since they were the ones who procrastinated and dumped it on the programmer at the last minute anyway!)

I built this visual tool to view all the domains in the database, and added Aplha filtering for easy sorting and view. Over 1000 domains passed through this system over the course of the years in operation.

Modifying the individual Virtual Host config.