Jason Stangroome

Overview I have been building secure, reliable, and resilient Internet-facing services on both the Linux and Windows platforms since the late 90s, and the consulted for years on Continuous Integration and automated deployment practices.

Over the last two years I've recovered the capacity in my personal life to think about my dependency on the big tech companies and to start exploring and migrating to alternatives.

I replaced Windows 11 on all my home and work machines with Linux about 6 months ago and I am not going back.

1Password has an excellent solution for managing SSH keys securely using their 1Password SSH Agent.

Update 2026-08-05: Added DNS-PERSIST-01 challenge option.

Update: minikube 0.29.0 has been released and includes my merged PR so you can enable embedded certificates with minikube config set embed-certs true once and then just symlink your .kube/config file from your WSL home directory to the same file in your W…

Update: I've been using the Sennheiser Presence for several hours every weekday for a year now and I'm still very happy with it and recommend it to others.

I develop services that run on Kubernetes.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka WSL or Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) provides a fantastic reproduction of a local Linux environment without needing a virtual machine.

While I favour a containerize-all-the-things approach to new projects I still need to maintain systems that were designed several years ago around a combination of containers and host-based applications working together.

Update: On 2017-DEC-13, DigitalOcean announced that private networking will be isolated to each account beginning February 2018.

Recently, Matt Hilton blogged about Source Control Antipatterns which included the practice of commenting code instead of deleting the code.

On Google Compute Engine (GCE) the latest VM boot images (at the time of writing) for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 (eg ubuntu-1604-xenial-v20170811) ship with a file at /etc/sysctl.d/99-gce.conf which contains: net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0 This kernel parameter…

In recent weeks we started receiving alerts whenever a new AWS EC2 Instance running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was launched for a specific Auto Scaling Group.

I recently had a frustrating experience with network connectivity for a set of AWS EC2 Instances running Ubuntu Trusty 14.04.

I have previously blogged about queuing a new Team Build at the successful completion of another Team Build for Team Foundation Server 2010.

In PowerShell, one of the most common examples you will see for parsing an XML file into a variable uses the Get-Content cmdlet and the cast operator, like this: $Document = [xml](Get-Content -Path myfile.xml) The resulting type of the $Document vari…

I've blogged twice before about the OutDir MSBuild property set by Team Build and I've recently discovered that with the default build process templates included with Team Foundation Server 2013, the passing of the OutDir can be disabled via a simple Team…

This year I have been working with a code base that exhibits Visual Studio projects with three characteristics: 1.

PowerShell v3 doesn't ship with help in the box anymore.

A common problem when managing deployments of applications, manual or automated, is where to securely store the passwords for service accounts used by Windows Services, IIS Application Pools, and Scheduled Tasks in each of the environments the applications

In my last post I described the problem of trying to change the Process Template of an existing Team Project in Team Foundation Server and the open-source project I built to solve it, WitMorph.

Background Historically Team Foundation Server process templates have not had a good upgrade story.

I've been working with a PowerShell script to automatically deploy an application to an environment.

Update:with Team Build 2013 it is easier still.

Update:with .NET 4.5 there is an easier way.

Note: This process is based on PowerShell v3 CTP 2 and is subject change.

Update:with Team Build 2013 you can even pass parameters to queued builds.

One of the many great things about PowerShell is that it can utilise the .NET framework directly and third party .NET libraries whenever PowerShell doesn't offer a native solution.

Today I was working on introducing Continuous Integration to a legacy code base and was discovering the hard way that the solution of about 20 projects had many conflicting references to external assemblies.

Now that I get to work with a TFS 2010 Lab Management environment most days, I find myself building various virtual machines to replicate the production environments of our clients for testing.

I have pieced together a simple PowerShell script to recursively locate all duplicate files (by content, not name) below a chosen directory.

I recently encountered a server where SQL Server had somehow been installed to the admin user's mapped U: drive instead of drive C:.