IT

4sysops

1. Mount an S3 bucket on an EC2 instance at boot using fstab with Mountpoint for Amazon S3 or s3fs-fuse
   Mountpoint for Amazon S3 (mountpoint-s3) now allows you to mount an S3 bucket in AWS at EC2 instance boot time via fstab. However, it remains non-POSIX compliant, so standard filesystem operations like deleting or renaming files still do not work. In contrast, the open-source alternative s3fs-fuse offers substantial POSIX support but comes with its own drawbacks.

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2. Enable Administrator Protection in Windows 11
   Enabling Administrator protection in Windows 11 significantly improves security by addressing critical User Account Control (UAC) weaknesses. Unlike UAC’s split-token model, where elevated processes share the user’s session and can be exploited by malware, Administrator Protection creates a separate, system-managed administrator account (SMAA) that generates isolated, just-in-time admin tokens for each task, which are destroyed immediately after use.

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3. Create an Amazon Bedrock Agent: A simple Lambda function example
   Creating an AI agent in Amazon Bedrock involves a relatively complex process. The example in this post has been simplified for clarity. Once you have your first Agent setup working, exploring all the features that AI agents in AWS offer becomes much easier. The Bedrock Agent I discuss uses a Lambda function, which can be triggered by the AI model when the user prompt indicates its usefulness. An AWS Lambda function is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers. These functions may involve complex logic, enabling the AI agent to perform sophisticated tasks autonomously.

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4. Activate Windows authentication with a PIN
   Entering a PIN is one of the authentication methods available through Microsoft’s Windows Hello. It offers a simplified sign-in experience, especially for devices that lack biometric capabilities. This option must be explicitly enabled in domain-joined environments or those using Entra ID. However, its functionality is significantly restricted on virtual machines hosted on Hyper-V.

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5. Install Gmail MCP server for AI-powered email search
   The Gmail MCP server covered in this post lets you access Gmail from any AI client that supports MCP. I found the MCP server more capable than Google's integration with Gemini in Gmail. The AI-powered search feature proved to be helpful, but the MCP server also offers several other valuable commands. In this post, I used Claude Desktop. However, once you install the MCP server and set up the Gmail API, you can access Gmail through MCP from any compatible AI application by copying the MCP JSON. I expect that the ChatGPT app and even Windows 11 will add MCP support very soon.

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6. Install Fedora and Arch Linux on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
   Fedora and Arch Linux, two popular Linux distributions, are now officially available for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). In the past, installing Fedora or Arch on WSL involved extra effort. Users needed to manually download and import tarballs or rely on unofficial Microsoft Store versions, many of which required payment. The introduction of WSL 2.4.4 marked a shift by adding native support for tar-based distributions, which package their OS files in a tar archive. This update allows distro developers like Fedora and Arch to offer official, free WSL versions.

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7. OpenAI Agents SDK with MCP server support: A log monitoring example
   OpenAI recently introduced the Agents SDK, a Python-based framework that enables developers and DevOps engineers to build AI agents. The example in this post showcases a script that uses the OpenAI Agents SDK to connect an AI agent to Anthropic’s filesystem MCP server. This integration enables the AI agent to analyze the contents of a monitoring log.

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8. Microsoft Edit: Terminal editor for Windows and Linux
   Microsoft has recently launched Edit, a lightweight terminal editor for Windows and Linux. It revives the spirit of the MS-DOS Editor, which debuted in 1991 as a full-screen text editor for DOS and early Windows systems. Edit eliminates the need to leave the terminal to edit files. While Edit doesn't feature a traditional GUI, it supports tab management and can be navigated using a mouse. On Linux, the open-source tool can be seen as an alternative to nano.

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9. Install Anthropic Claude Code as VS Code “extension”
   The leader in coding models has rolled out Claude Code to the public. Anthropic's terminal-based AI coding assistant automates editing, testing, and managing git workflows using natural language commands. Although you cannot install Claude Code as a VS Code extension via the marketplace, its integration into the open-source IDE is straightforward, and the user experience closely resembles GitHub Copilot, Cline, or Roo Code. My review of the preview version was somewhat critical because I dislike coding in the terminal. However, Claude Code now integrates well with VS Code and JetBrains, so I changed my original verdict.

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10. Features on Demand (FoD) in Windows Server 2025 Nano Containers
    Windows Server 2025 introduced several advancements that make containerized workloads more flexible, secure, and customizable. One notable feature is the addition of Features on Demand (FoD) in Nano Server containers. This feature allows you to customize Nano Server containers by adding only the necessary components while keeping your container images small and optimized. In this guide, we’ll explore how to enable and use Features on Demand within Nano Server containers, providing real-world use cases that demonstrate this feature's power. We will also examine how it impacts container image sizes.

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