Posts

The Problem About 18 months ago I built up a road bike ago using an L-Twoo GRX wireless electronic groupset, and I have been very pleased with it. I planned to ride it this weekend, after not using it for about three weeks, so I charged the battery that drives both the front and rear derailleurs, but stupidly did not do a quick test ride. That was a mistake. I drove to my starting point and started my ride, but I found that I could not shift gear. Luckily the ride was very flat and the bike in a reasonable gear, so I was able to complete the ride with no problems. ...

The Problem As a consultant I am issued a variety of laptops by clients in addition to my own Lenovo X1 Carbon. I am currently using is a Dell Latitude 7450, and it’s WIFI has been causing me problems. It is very slow, maybe 2Mb/s when other devices on the same WIFI network are seeing 200 to 250 Mb/s. I had been ignoring this problem for a while as I was able to use a docking station which gave me Ethernet networking, so bypassing the issue. However, after changing location this was no longer an option. So I had to do something about the root cause. ...

I am currently doing some Azure deployment work using Azure DevOps. The target Azure configuration has a mixture of publicly accessible resources and private ones only available via a vNet and private endpoints. Whilst getting this deployment setup I made a mistake and configured an ADO pipeline job to use an ADO self hosted agent, as opposed to a Microsoft hosted agent. The self hosted agent was on the private vNet and was intended to only deploy to the private resources on that vNet and hence had limited access to the wider set of Azure resources. ...

The Problem I was recently doing some initial testing around the migration of a client’s Azure DevOps Server 2019 to Azure DevOps Services. The basic process is Upgrade to the current version of Azure DevOps Server, currently 2022.2 Validate the Team Project Collection (TPC) to be migrated, fixing any issues Upload a backup of the TPC DB to Azure and run the migrations service. As this was just an initial test, to get rough timings and find any major process customisation issues, I was using a ’throwaway’ VM, not the clients actual Azure DevOps Server. ...

The Problem Due to recent changes at NIST and the way they host the NVD DB the dependency-check/DependencyCheck tool that underpins the Azure DevOps OWASP Dependency Check is struggling to download the vulnerabilities DB. This is all discussed in this support thread. The root cause of the problems is a mixture of many updates to the NVD DB, increasing the download size, and tighter throttling of the API. The net-effect of this is that download the NVD DB now takes hours, not minutes, with many timeouts and retries. ...

The Problem I have posted in the past about caching the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) used by Jeremy Long’s DependencyCheck tool via the associated Azure DevOps task. Today I had an issue that on one pipeline the Azure DevOps task was reporting the following error Starting: Dependency Check ============================================================================== Task : OWASP Dependency Check Description : Dependency Check is a Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool that attempts to detect publicly disclosed vulnerabilities contained within a project's dependencies. Version : 6.3.0 Author : Dependency Check Help : [More Information](https://github.com/dependency-check/azuredevops) ============================================================================== Starting Dependency Check... Setting report directory to D:\a\1\TestResults\dependency-check Creating report directory at D:\a\1\TestResults\dependency-check Downloading Dependency Check latest installer from GitHub.. Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'find') ##[error]Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'find') ##[error]Unhandled error condition detected. Ending Dependency Check... Finishing: Dependency Check The Analysis I tried a few things: ...

The Problem I recently came across a problem with a complex BitTalk solution being built in an Azure DevOps Pipeline. It had been working fine, but it started to fail with error related to failing to copy built DLLs from the obj folder to the bin folder because it said the files were in use by MSBuild. The Analysis I tried a few things, all to little effect: Restarted the self-hosted Azure DevOps Pipeline agent, in case they were holding a lock on a file Delete the builds _work\<number> folder, in case it had become corrupted Re-ran the build against the last Git commit, this worked so at least proving the issue was in a code change and not something to do with the build agent VM. Built the solution locally on a development PC via Visual Studio, it built OK Built the solution using the same, or at least similar (removing the Azure DevOps specific flags) MSBuild command locally on a development PC, and this time I got the same error. So the issue was a recent code changes, but only showed up when using MSBuild directly, but not when letting Visual Studio orchestrate the build process. ...

Whilst at DDD South West I did a very enjoyable panel podcast recording for Dan Clarke’s Unhandled Exception podcast on the subject of the impact of AI on software development. I am please to say that the recording of the panel has just been published. So why not have a listen to it, or any of Dan’s back catalog

Thanks to everyone who came to my session ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?` at yesterday’s DDD South West. I don’t believe there is a recording of this session from any event where I have delivered it, but you can find a copy of my slides, with all my other presentations, in the repo rfennell/Presentations Thanks again to the DDD South West organisers for putting on another great event. ...

Background I have posted in the past on how we manage Azure DevOps Pipeline Agents with Packer and Lability. Whilst deploying a new agent I hit a interesting problem, the issue was completely a ‘UTS’ (user too stupid) error, but the way it was surfaced was I think interesting. The Problem My script built and deployed a new Hyper-V VM, setting up the OS, adding disks and installing the Azure DevOps Pipeline agent. However, the agent did not get registered with Azure DevOps. On checking, I could see that the new VM had a configured network adaptor, but no network connection ...