Monthly Archives: Aug 2018

Taking the Linux plunge – Update

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It’s been a couple of weeks now since I took the plunge and bought myself a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu 16.04.

And to be honest, so far so good! The machine itself is absolutely fantastic and apart from one issue now resolved, Ubuntu has been great to use. I used it to present my partitioning session at the Dublin User Group this week and all went well. Using SQL in a docker container and SQL Operations Studio, my demos worked no problem.

Have to admit, the only gripe I have is that there’s a windows key instead of a key with the Ubuntu logo 🙂

So once I had booted up the first thing I did was uninstall Chrome and Chromium. After that, I went and installed: –

Firefox– with DuckDuckGo as my homepage
Docker
SQL Operations Studio
Visual Studio Code
Powershell
Remmina
Franz
Spotify
Whatever – Evernote client for Linux
Keybase

OK, there’s a couple of obvious ones in there but maybe a couple that are new to you.

If you haven’t heard of Franz, it’s awesome. One of my pet peeves these days is the amount of comms apps that I have to have open. Slack, Google Hangouts, Teams, email etc. it’s a bit of a nightmare. Franz solves that issue by combining them all into one app, ok it’s a bit of a memory hog but that’s kinda to be expected.

Another app not everyone may be familiar with is Keybase. Keybase is a security app that provides public keys, encrypted chat, and an encrypted filesystem. The filesystem offering is why I went for it, you can install OneDrive on Linux but it’s a bit of a hassle and I’m not a particular fan of Dropbox so am glad that I have another option (even if it is ANOTHER chat app, and it doesn’t integrate with Franz 😦 )

One final thing to mention is Gitpitch. Gitpitch is a markdown presentation service that integrates with Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket. You write your presentation in markdown, push it to a repo, and the service renders your presentation online (which you can then download).

I used GitPitch for my presentation to the Dublin User Group this week and was a bit concerned at first as my markdown skills are, ahem, not great. You can see the presentation I wrote here, I’m really pleased with the results. I also really enjoyed creating that presentation, which is new for me as I hate writing powerpoint slides. Am going to spend some more time this weekend seeing what else the service can do.

So all in all, am really pleased with my new toy. If you’re thinking about switching to Linux, I highly recommend that you do, what’s the worst that could happen? 🙂

Have a good weekend!

SSL Provider error 31 when connecting to SQL in a docker container

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I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu 16.04 and ran into an issue when connecting SQL Operations Studio (version 0.31.4) to SQL 2017 CU9 running in a docker container. Other people seem to encountering this issue as well so am posting it so that it may be of some help to someone in the future.

The error generated was: –

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 31)

The full error can be viewed here

I was a bit stumped with this one to be honest, I googled around but could not find a resolution.

So I reached out on twitter to get some help: –

I also logged an issue on the SQL Operations Studio Github

Thankfully I got a response from Kevin Cunnane (t): –

Kevin advised me to run: –

sudo update-ca-certificates --fresh

N.B. – See here for a detailed description of what this command does

Once I ran that I was able to connect to SQL running in a docker container from SQL Operations Studio. Many thanks Kevin!

Hope that helps!

Evening or morning poll results!

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And the results of the poll are in!

Evening just scraping it! So there’s a pretty even mix out there, interesting. Thanks to all who voted, was good fun reading all the comments on twitter.

A lot of morning voters said that they used to be evening people but have now changed. I’m betting have children played a big part in that 🙂

I’ll leave that poll open in case anyone else wants to vote.

Have a good weekend!