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Kansas State University: One Year with VisionPort

By Sanford Libo
August 18, 2022

A wide view of KSU’s campus from above, in Google Earth, showing what might be displayed on KSU’s VisionPort.

It has been almost a year since Kansas State University brought the VisionPort platform into their Hale library. I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Jeff Sheldon, Associate Director of the Sunderland Foundation Innovation Lab, to discuss how the school has been using the platform.

It’s no surprise to hear that the Architecture, Planning and Design (AP) students have taken to VisionPort immediately. Being originally designed around displaying geographic information system (GIS) data, the platform allows users to fly over and through city streets and see buildings in 3D, as well as travel around the world looking for areas of possible real estate development. Many of our clients also use VisionPort to give panoramic, three-dimensional tours of building interiors, to show future tenants properties right from their office and brainstorm design possibilities.

In addition to the AP Design students, VisionPort has found itself being used to immerse students in their education with an incredible National Geographic presentation that features 360° videos including swimming with sharks and getting up close to sea lions and elephants in their natural habitats, as well as …

visionport education

Ansible tutorial with AWS EC2

By Jeffry Johar
August 11, 2022

A ferris wheel lit up by red lights at night
Photo by David Buchi

Ansible is a tool to manage multiple remote systems from a single command center. In Ansible, the single command center is known as the control node and the remote systems to be managed are known as managed nodes. The following describes the 2 nodes:

Control node:
- The command center where Ansible is installed.
- Supported systems are Unix and Unix-like (Linux, BSD, macOS).
- Python and sshd are required.
- Remote systems to be managed are listed in a YAML or INI file called an inventory.
- Tasks to be executed are defined in a YAML file called a playbook.
Managed node:
- The remote systems to be managed.
- Supported systems are Unix/Unix-like, Windows, and Appliances (eg: Cisco, NetApp).
- Python and sshd are required for Unix/Unix-like.
- PowerShell and WinRM are required for Windows.

In this tutorial we will use Ansible to manage multiple EC2 instances. For simplicity, we are going to provision EC2 instances in the AWS web console. Then we will configure one EC2 as the control node that will be managing multiple EC2 instances as managed nodes.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial we will need the following from AWS:

An active AWS account.
EC2 instances with Amazon …

ansible aws linux sysadmin

Implementing Backend Tasks in ASP.NET Core

By Kevin Campusano
August 8, 2022

As we’ve already established, Ruby on Rails is great. The amount and quality of tools that Rails puts at our disposal when it comes to developing web applications is truly outstanding. One aspect of web application development that Rails makes particularly easy is that of creating backend tasks.

These tasks can be anything from database maintenance, file system cleanup, overnight heavy computations, bulk email dispatch, etc. In general, functionality that is typically initiated by a sysadmin in the backend, or scheduled in a cron job, which has no GUI, but rather, is invoked via command line.

By integrating with Rake, Rails allows us to very easily write such tasks as plain old Ruby scrips. These scripts have access to all the domain logic and data that the full-fledged Rails app has access to. The cherry on top is that the command-line interface to invoke such tasks is very straightforward. It looks something like this: bin/rails fulfillment:process_new_orders.

All this is included right out of the box for new Rails projects.

ASP.NET Core, which is also great, doesn’t support this out of the box like Rails does.

However, I think we should be able to implement our own …

csharp dotnet aspdotnet

SSH Key Auth using KeeAgent with Git Bash and Windows CLI OpenSSH

By Ron Phipps
August 8, 2022

A leather couch in surprisingly good condition sits on a patch of grass between the sidewalk and the road. Harsh sunlight casts shadows of trees and buildings on the street and couch.

In a previous blog post we showed how to configure KeePass and KeeAgent on Windows to provide SSH key agent forwarding with confirmation while using PuTTY and other PuTTY agent compatible programs. In this post we’ll expand on that by showing how to use the same key agent to provide SSH key auth when using Git Bash and the Windows command line OpenSSH.

Git Bash support

Open KeePass, click on Tools → Options, select the KeeAgent tab.

Create C:\Temp if it does not exist.

Check the two boxes in the Cygwin/MSYS Integration section.

Directly after each box, fill in the path: C:\Temp\cygwin-ssh.socket for the Cygwin compatible socket file, and C:\Temp\msys-ssh.socket for the msysGit compatible socket file.

KeePass options, open to the KeeAgent tab. Highlighted is the Cygwin/MSYS section, with two boxes checked. One reads “Create Cygwin compatible socket file (works with some versions of MSYS)”. The other reads “Create msysGit compatible socket file”. After each is the path described above.

Click OK.

Open Git Bash.

Create the file ~/.bash_profile with the contents:

test -f ~/.profile && . ~/.profile
test -f ~/.bashrc && . ~/.bashrc

Create the file ~/.bashrc with the contents:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="C:\Temp\cygwin-ssh.socket"

Close and reopen Git Bash.

You should now be able to SSH with Git Bash using your loaded SSH key and a dialog box should appear to approve the use of the key.

Git Bash running ssh to a redacted server, with a dialog box reading “(ssh) has requested to use the SSH key (redacted) with fingerprint (redacted). Do you want to allow this?” The dialog’s “No” button is selected by default.

Windows command line OpenSSH support

Open KeePass, click on Tools …

windows ssh

Auburn University and VisionPort: How the World Gets Its Water

By Samuel Stern
July 28, 2022

A VisionPort presenting about the Central Arizona Project

The IBT Water Project at Auburn University, headed by Associate Professor P.L. Chaney, has done outstanding work illustrating in a GIS format how cities around the world get their water. The Geoscience department has mapped how water is captured and distributed in Australia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Kazakhstan, and the western USA.

The department chose the Central Arizona Project to turn into an interactive presentation on the VisionPort platform.

GIS showing water pumping sites

Starting at the Mark Wilmer Pumping Plant, water is pumped from the Colorado River towards over a dozen plants and lifted up over 2,000 feet in elevation across a series of “stair-steps” before it reaches its final destination near Tucson, where it is then distributed across the state to where it is most needed.

This data displayed on their VisionPort, installed in a custom wood case in their library, allows students to see the entire journey in a 3D environment spanning seven 65-inch displays. The presenter can take them to each stop and explain the functions of the many plants, check gates, and turnouts along the way.

A man giving a presentation with the VisionPort

Numerous departments at Auburn University have had success turning their presentations into engaging experiences on the …

visionport gis education

Running PostgreSQL on Docker

By Jeffry Johar
July 27, 2022

An elephant in a jungle

Introduction

PostgreSQL, or Postgres, is an open-source relational database. It is officially supported on all the major operating systems: Windows, Linux, BSD, MacOS, and others.

Besides running as an executable binary in an operating system, Postgres is able to run as a containerized application on Docker! In this article we are going to walk through the Postgres implementation on Docker.