Intro

Remote desktop protocol (RDP) is a secure network communications protocol designed for remote management, as well as for remote access to virtual desktops, applications and an RDP terminal server.
RDP allows network administrators to remotely diagnose and resolve problems individual subscribers encounter. RDP is available for most versions of the Windows, MacOS or as an open source.
Noteworthy properties of RDP include encryption, smart card authentication, bandwidth reduction, resource sharing, the ability to use multiple displays and the ability to disconnect temporarily without logging off. RDP also allows for the redirection of functions such as audio and printing.
RDP can support up to 64,000 independent channels for data transmission. Data can be encrypted using 128-bit keys, and the bandwidth reduction feature optimizes the data transfer rate in low-speed connections.
The RDP protocol is designed to provide remote access through port 3389. An RDP-enabled application or service packages the data that is to be transmitted, and the Microsoft Communications Service directs the data to an RDP channel. From there, the operating system encrypts the RDP data and adds it to a frame so that it can be transmitted.
The Terminal Server Device Redirector Driver handles all RDP protocol activity. This driver is made up of subcomponents such as the RDP driver (Wdtshare.sys), which handles user interfaces, transfers, encryption, compression and framing. The transport driver (Tdtcp.sys) is responsible for packaging the protocol in such a way that allows it to be sent across a TCP/IP network.

See latest versions in use at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol

The Remote Window Isn’t the Correct Size

Incorrect window size is another common Remote Desktop Connection issue. When you create the remote desktop connection, the window is too large, too small, or doesn’t correlate to the settings you input.
You have two potential fixes here.
First, you can force the Remote Desktop connection to use a specific size via the Run function. Hit Windows key + R, then input:

mstsc.exe /h:X /w:X

Where “X” is the height and width of the Remote Desktop viewing window you desire. Remote Desktop will remember your settings for future remote viewing settings.
The Remote Desktop Connection client has a handy screen resolution slider that scrolls from 640×480 up to Full Screen for your screen. Make sure to set the slider to Full Screen if you want a full-screen remote connection for each connection.

How to Save Your Remote Desktop Connection Custom Settings

If you regularly connect to several different servers or clients, saving a custom configuration for each Remote Desktop will save time in the future. You can set the optimum width, height, and color settings for each server or terminal.
Open the Remote Desktop Connection dialog, then select Show Options. You will now see the Connection settings options. Select Save As, specify your save location, then select Save to create a custom Remote Desktop Connection file (.RDP).
Now, browse to the Remote Desktop Connection configuration file. You can edit the configuration file using a text editor, such as Notepad or Notepad++. Right-click the configuration file and select Open with…, then select your text editor.
The first four lines show your remote connection screen size options (plus whether multi-monitor mode is available). You can edit the screen mode to set whether the remote window session appears full screen. For instance, “id:i:2” sets full screen, whereas “id:i:1” sets the remote connection to appear in a window.
If you set the screen mode to “2” for full screen, the desktopwidth and desktopheight automatically match the screen size of the host client. However, if you are using screen mode “1,” you can use the desktopwidth and desktopheight settings to set a specific window size.
After you confirm your settings, add the following string to the end of the file:

smart sizing:i:1

Smart sizing allows you to dynamically alter your screen settings without messing around with configuration files while the Remote Desktop connection is active. However, you must add the string for each custom configuration you create.

Handy Remote Desktop Connection Shortcuts

You can boost your Remote Desktop Connection productivity using a handful of keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts are designed to work when you access Remote Desktop using the Run dialog.

• Start Remote Desktop in full-screen mode: mstsc /f
• Start Remote Desktop in Admin Mode: mstsc /admin
• Matches your Remote Desktop session with the local virtual desktop: mstsc /span
• Matches your Remote Desktop session to the Client Layout: mstsc /multimon
• Open the .RDP file for editing—change “connection file” to your file name before running the command: mstsc /edit “connection file”

You can use the following Remote Desktop shortcuts once your Remote Desktop connection is live:

• Switches your Remote Desktop client between full-screen and windowed mode: Ctrl + Alt + Pause
• Force the Remote Desktop into full-screen mode: Ctrl + Alt + Break
• Takes a screenshot of the active Remote Desktop window: Ctrl + Alt + Minus
• Takes a screenshot of the entire Remote Desktop: Ctrl + Alt + Plus
• Reboots the remote computer: Ctrl + Alt + End

Ubuntu server RDP – option 1 – xrdp

Access via SSH and install XRDP

sudo apt install xrdp

Follow this with

sudo systemctl enable xrdp

Ubuntu server RDP – option 2 – vnc

Another option with full remote desktop functionality is VNC. This requires a client application on the Windows PC and a server on Ubuntu.
On the remote PC, install the TightVNC Server component after checking for updates:

sudo apt update

Then install the server utility:

sudo apt install tightvncserver

You’ll then need to run it:

sudo tightvncserver

At this point you’ll be prompted to set a password for the connection. You’ll also be given a desktop number, usually :1. Keep a note of this.

Now that TightVNC Server is set up on Ubuntu, you’ll need to install the client on Windows. This can be downloaded from www.tightvnc.com/download.php—make sure you choose the right version, as it is available in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

TightVNC tools are only available as a bundle, so once installed, look for TightVNC Viewer in Windows search.

Once you’ve launched the viewer, input the IP address of the Ubuntu box in Remote Host, followed by the desktop number. So, it might look like this:

192.168.0.99:1

Input the password when prompted and commence your remote desktop activity!

TightVNC can be set More Secure – By default, TightVNC will encrypt your password, but nothing else. This makes it insecure for connections over the internet. Fortunately, it can be made more secure, thanks to SSH and Xming.
To use this, download and install the Xming tool for Windows from Sourceforge. Once this is done, look for the desktop shortcut, right-click, and choose Properties.
Click Apply to save the change, then OK. Double-click the icon to run Xming, then open PuTTY. Here, expand the menu on the left to Connection > SSH > X11.
Check Enable X11 Forwarding, then return to Session at the top of the menu.

It will be most secure of RDP over SSH or VNC over SSH (Mixing VNC with SSH) is used

INTRO – Why NPP

Notepad++ is the most popular text/source code editor. It features syntax highlighting, code folding and limited autocompletion for programming, scripting, and markup languages, but not intelligent code completion or syntax checking.
We love its speed and power, but it’s even better once you dig a little deeper.

Macros

One of the killer features for Notepad++ is the ability to automate those trivial things we have to write on a daily basis. To do this with macros, simply click the record button on the toolbar and perform the task. For example, if you wanted to delete every other character in a document, you would click right, right, then backspace. After doing this once, click the stop button to finish recording your macro. Press play each time you want this action performed, or click the fast forward button to initiate the action multiple times. You can even save a created macro for further use, by assigning it one of the many available keyboard shortcuts found under the save macro button.

Column Editing

Another interesting feature you won’t find in your everyday text editor is Column Editing. You can invoke column selection by holding down the Alt key while selecting text. From here you can cut, copy, paste, insert, and delete, just as you would with normal text selection. Furthermore, you can insert Variable Text in these column selections. By default, Notepad++ allows you to insert an initial number with an incremental value, so that you can create numbered lists on the fly.

Project Management, Tabulated

Notepad++ has the ability to save your current working state, and it also benefits from tabbed browsing. You can use this more to your advantage by creating sessions. File >> Save Session and specify a name and file extension for this project. When you’d like to bring this project up again, just select File >> Open Session and navigate to this project file. Your project files will be intact from the last time you saved them. By default Notepad++ treats your open tabs as a session, and loads that session up after restarting the application.

File Comparison

Often you may want to have two files open side-by-side rather than tabbed in one window. To split the application window, select one of the documents of interest, right click, and choose Move to Other View. If you’d like to create another version of the same file, select Clone to Other View. On a related note, you can also compare the contents of the last two tabs open using Compare from the plugins menu. This can be useful for code revisions or rewrites in general. Furthermore, with Compare you can even compare your current file with the previous save by selecting Compare to Last Save

Custom Highlighting and Tweak

The programming language detection is automatic, but you can change it if necessary through the languages menu. If the language you require is not included by default, check online for over 50 additional options and instructions for installation

Plugins

Extensive list of plugins to do anything one wishes.
Examples:
QuickText – Here we will define hotstrings to be replaced with user-defined text.
Compare – compare two notes side-by-side. This can be useful for code revisions or rewrites in general. Furthermore, with Compare you can even compare your current file with the previous save by selecting Compare to Last Save, or just pressing Alt+S
Autosave – it should be the first plugin you set up (it’s included with install, so you have no excuse). You can choose to save all open tabs, or the current one on a timed interval, or simply when Notepad++ loses focus.

Styling

Under Settings on the Menu bar. From here you can select an included theme, but you certainly aren’t limited to these. You may define your own globally, or limit it to specific languages. You can also change the default font from here (which I usually do, as Courier New’s 1’s tend to look an awful lot like lowercase L’s). You can do a little bit more tweaking from the Preferences menu, also found under Settings. From here, you can check the Vertical checkbox to load the tabs on the side. You can also choose to hide the menu bar, revealing it with the Alt key.
New theme cam be created at C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\themes

Configs

Recently opened files quickly

You can get up to 15 files in the list with the actual path. If you think that this feature is useful, and you want to increase the number of “Recently Opened” files, here is a trick to increase or decrease the number. Open Settings > Preferences. Under the Recent Files History, you will get the option to change the number.

Workspace and Treeview

If you are developing a theme, obviously there are more than one files. It is quite difficult to open and close different files in a particular folder. To solve this problem, Notepad++ has an awesome feature called Folder as Workspace, which helps users to view all the files and folders in the tree view. You can see a sidebar on the left-hand side that will let you open a particular folder and file. To open a folder, click on File > Open Folder as Workspace

Tasks and Functions

Find text and replace in multiple files

Select Search > Find in Files from the menu. If you like keyboard shortcuts better, use Ctrl-Shift-F to open the search window instead. The find in files configuration window is pretty easy to use as you can ignore most options if you don’t require them. You can also use regex and the replace option to replace the text you entered with other text.

Find changes side by side

If you have made few changes in a particular file or say you want to make two instances of a single file. To do this, open or create the file that you want to place side by side or make another instance. Then, right-click on the tab and select Clone to Other View.
Any two files can be compared with the COMPARE plugin also.

Box selection

Box selection means that text can be selected vertically as well as horisontally. Really cool. You need to hold down the Alt key while doing a selection; you can select a block horizontally.

Run in browser

You can test html file in browser by clicking RUN and select Launch in Browser.

Align Lines

It’s my favorite feature. You can line up multiple lines by ,(comma), = (equal sign) or clipboard character. It is very useful and helpful in Box selection. (needs TextFX plugin)

Handy RegEx

[ ] – The square brackets can be used to match ONE of multiple characters. For instance, [abc] matches any of the characters a, b or c. Ranges can also be used, [a-z]

^ – The caret can be used inside the square brackets to exclude characters from the match. For instance, hell[^o] means the string ‘hell’ will be ignored if followed by the letter ‘o’. Another example is [^A-Za-z] which will exclude all alphabetic characters.

$ – This matches the end of a line.

. – The period or dot matches any character.

\d – Matches any single digit.

\w – Matches any single alphanumeric characters or underscore.

\s – Matches whitespaces including tabs and line breaks.

* – The asterisk or star sign matches 0 or more times. For example, Ba*m matches Bm , Bam , Baam etc.

+ – The plus sign matches 1 or more times. For example, lo+l matches lol , lool , loool etc.

\< – Matches the start of a word. For example, \< directly followed by ‘sh’ matches ‘she’ but does not matches ‘wish’.

\> – Matches the end of a word. For example, sh\> matches ‘wish’ and does not matches ‘she’.

( ) – The round brackets can be used in the Find & Replace function to tag a match. tagged matches can then be used in replace with \1, \2 etc. For example, If you write 123xxxRRR in the search and 123\1HHH in the ‘Replace with’ filed, the result will be: 123xxxHHH.

\ – The backslash can be used to escape regex characters. For example to match 1+1=2, the correct regex is 1\+1=2. Otherwise, the plus sign will have a special meaning.

Search for number of digits and add a dot at the end:
Find: (\d\d)
Replace: \1.

Remove a dot at te end of any line:
Find: [.]\r
Replace: leave blank

Intro

A great calculator for the services used can be found at https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
Amazon is most famous with the virtual server it provides (EC2). However many more managed services are provided on top of it

Servers

Aws virtual servers are called instances – EC2. Computing unit EC2 needs storage utilized by EBS volumes. EBS volumes also come with snapshot capabilities. An EBS snapshot is a point-in-time copy of an EBS volume, meaning that it stores the exact image of an EBS volume at a certain point-in-time.
EBS snapshots are, in fact, stored by default in Amazon S3, but in a separate AWS infrastructure that is not a user-visible bucket. We’ll touch on this more a bit later. If you are already managing workloads on AWS, you certainly know that AWS storage bills can get quite high.

• The cost of EBS snapshots is $0.05 per GB per month.
• S3 storage is in average $0.022 per GB per month

Backups

There are two ways to implement backups of your EC2 instances on AWS:

• If your instance is EBS-backed, you can create the snapshots of the EBS volume.
• Or, you can create an AMI of your instances as a backup solution.

Both the EBS snapshot and the AMI are automatically stored on Amazon S3 which is known for being highly durable and reliable. That is already designed to use as little storage space as possible! Incrimental snapshots explained here.
In 2019 AWS introduced it’s own AWS Backup. It is set up and managed through an AWS Management Console through which users can configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place.

Sample prices for the US East region are below:

	AWS Service	Warm $/month (S3)	Cold $/month (Glacier)
Backup	EFS	0.05	0.01/GB
	EBS	0.05	n/a
	RDS Database	0.095	n/a
	DynamoDB Table	0.10	n/a
	Storage Gateway	0.05	n/a
Restore	EFS	0.02/GB	0.03/GB
	EBS	Free	n/a
	RDS Database	Free	n/a
	DynamoDB Table	0.05/GB	n/a
	Storage Gateway	Free	n/a

S3 storage

Simple Storage Solution (S3) – Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Works perfect for Cloud backup with enhanced permission scheme, making it a little more confusing than other cloud backup solutions. It has advanced IAM The cheaper , cold version of storage – Glacier has limits on retrieavel in standart mode (see below)

AWS Glacier

Glacier is AWS cold storage, few times cheaper than S3. There is no native way to move Snapshots to Glacier. EBS snapshots are stored in S3, but that is a “behind the scenes” implementation detail. The snapshots are not visible in an S3 bucket, not are they exposed via the S3 API. So you cannot move them to Glacier.

• Expedited — Expedited retrievals allow you to quickly access your data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required. Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1–5 minutes. Provisioned Capacity ensures that retrieval capacity for Expedited retrievals is available when you need it. For more information, see Provisioned Capacity.
• Standard — Standard retrievals allow you to access any of your archives within several hours. Standard retrievals typically complete within 3–5 hours. This is the default option for retrieval requests.
• Bulk — Bulk retrievals are Glacier’s lowest-cost retrieval option, which you can use to retrieve large amounts, even petabytes, of data inexpensively in a day. Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5–12 hours.

S3 Glacier archives have a minimum 90 days of storage, and archives deleted before 90 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days.
Free Tier Only Policy for Retrieval: You can set a data retrieval policy to Free Tier Only to ensure that your retrievals will always stay within your free tier allowance, so you don’t incur data retrieval charges. If a retrieval request is rejected, you will receive an error message stating that the request has been denied by the current data retrieval policy.
Max Retrieval Rate can be set to say 1GB/hr which will cost $0.01 per GB. That comes up to $7.20 per month or less (730hrs in a month)
If extended to say 10GB/hr, each GB per hr retrieved will be charged per that predefined charge per Gig.
With both Free Tier Only and Max Retrieval Rate policies, data retrieval requests that would exceed the retrieval limits you specified will not be accepted.

IAM – AWS Identity and Access Management

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.  Offered as part of the service with no additional costs.

Best practices include the following:

• Lock Away Your AWS Account Root User Access Keys
• Create Individual IAM Users
• Use Groups to Assign Permissions to IAM Users
• Grant Least Privilege
• Get Started Using Permissions with AWS Managed Policies
• Use Customer Managed Policies Instead of Inline Policies
• Use Access Levels to Review IAM Permissions
• Configure a Strong Password Policy for Your Users
• Enable MFA
• Use Roles for Applications That Run on Amazon EC2 Instances
• Use Roles to Delegate Permissions
• Do Not Share Access Keys
• Rotate Credentials Regularly
• Remove Unnecessary Credentials
• Use Policy Conditions for Extra Security
• Monitor Activity in Your AWS Account

AWS VPC

Amazon VPC is the networking layer for Amazon EC2 . Complete details here

• VPCs are based on Subnets Private subnets with no Public IPs and Public subnets open to Internet via Elastic IP (EIP) or a Network Gateway
• Supported Platforms
• Default and Nondefault VPCs
• Accessing the Internet – Gateway (for whole subnet) or Public IP (per instance) is required for acces of external resources
• Accessing a Corporate or Home Network – IPSec vpn or DirectConnect
• Accessing Services Through AWS PrivateLink
• AWS Private Global Network Considerations

Route 53 – DNS

Advanced DNS with aliaces and internal redirect, too good. Uses CNAMEs and ANAMEs !!

RDS – MS SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Aurora

CloudWatch

alerting rules along with SNS – simple notification ans SES – simple email notifications

CloudFront – managed CDN

WorkSpaces – Workstations in the cloud

AWS support

help support plans – Developer/Business/Enterprise

AWS