Blogs

For my job I do a lot of Puppet and I thought it was about time to write some tips and tricks down.

First part of this post is about my environment setup. In my test setup I use a lot of environments. They are not at all useful, but that’s not the point. It’s my lab environment so things need to break once in a while. But with multiple environments Puppetlabs says that you should switch to directory environments (PuppetDoc) but some way or another I cannot get that to work in a good way with my PE version (3.4.3 (Puppet Enterprise 3.2.3)). So I started implementing dynamic environments, which is a simple way of specifying the directories for your environments.

This morning I was messing around with Docker and I wanted to build me a nice, clean container with Ubuntu in it, to test Ansible thingies. I’ve done that before and everything worked as a charm. Until today.

I have this Dockerfile (I’ve stripped it to the bare bones that still fail):

Last Saturday I attended Loadays in Antwerp, Belgium.

After listening to Jan Piet Mens’s talk about Ansible, I was up for it.

At 11:30 sharp, I started my own presentation for an almost packed room. It’s called Ansible, why and how I use it and you can find it on SpeackerDeck.

It was a lovely talk, with a very knowledgeable crowd.

Please, have a look at it and if you have any questions, let me know.

Last couple of days I attended Configuration Managememt Camp in Ghent, Belgium. On Monday morning we started of with presentations of Mark Burgess (CFEngine), Luke Kanies (Puppet) and Adam Jacob (Chef). Good talks about the future of things.

After lunch it got nerdy ans I joined the Ansible room, to see how things went and at 17:00 I started my own presentation for a completely packed room. It’s called `Ansible, why and how I use it' and you can find it on SpeackerDeck.

It’s been a while since the last post, but I’ve been very, very busy.

And in the meantime I also found some time to take the LPI-102 exam. This resulted in a Pass and now I’m officially LPI1 certified.

Well, let’s see what’s next. Puppet exam, Ansible training, LPI2, Python ………

So much to learn, so little time.

Look at me, I made a Puppet Facter Fact!!!

With a lot of thanks to Andrew Beresford who started the initial code. I just tweaked it.

What it does is rather simple, it finds the expiration date of the SSL certificate of this host and returns the expiration date and time when there are less than 30 days left. Otherwise it just returns a --sign. In the Puppet manifest I check if it’s this --sign and if not I generate a warning.

Today I’m attending the first full day Ansible configuration meeting. This meeting is in Antwerp, Belgium, a drive of almost 2 hours. Thanks to Multi Mho (Maurice Verheesen) I didn’t need to drive, he wanted to try out his nice, new car. It drives perfectly and we arrived about 30 minutes early.

For a first meeting of a new tool there where a lot of attendants, amongst others (and I don’t want to forget anybody, so I won’t even try to give a complete list), but below are the people I think that where there.

Yesterday I attended the first meet up of the Dutch Puppet User Group and I gave a talk about how to start with Puppet.

It was called: Puppet deployment, an introduction and the PDF slideshow can be viewed or downloaded from speakerdeck.

If you have any comment, please send me an email.

Today I received an email from Chris Hackenschmidt with a patch for a category cloud for my We-Blog program.

Of course I have implemented that and you can see it in action on the right.

So, a new version of We-Blog is out, currently still 0.9, with a big Thank You to Chris.

Download it and enjoy.

John Macfarlane released a new version of Pandoc that has a lot of new enhancements. A lot of things have changed in the Markdown input types and it’s now compatible with PHP Markdown. This is very nice, because a lot of implementations use the extensions defined by PHP Markdown.

I downloaded the dmg file to install it on my MacBook Pro and it works like a charm.

So, I decided to install it on my new CentOS 6 server to build documents there. Well, I was in for a nice surprise.

Today a colleague asked me to sync some files to a server that is not listening on SSH port 22.

I normally create a configuration entry in my ~/.ssh/config file, like

and then command

But this time I didn’t want to create the entry in my SSH configuration, because I need this trick in a script. So I started to read the rsync manpage and after some experimenting I found

Playing with Ansible I did get the idea to make a nice welcome message when you log in to a server. This message needs to be placed in a file, which is configured in /etc/ssh/sshd_config with the banner option. I call this file /etc/issue.

Of course I want to deploy this file with Ansible, so I first defined an entry in the hosts file. This looks like this:

Hendrik Jan Thomassen not only sent me the tail of Haggis hunting but also a nice ancient poem as an ode to Haggis.

Here it is:

Most people are familiar with my love of Scotland, single malt and (of course) haggis. But most people do not have a clue what haggis is and when you tell them, they walk out in disgust.

But a colleague of mine found out that haggis is just an animal that can be hunted in the Scottish Highlands.

This is how it’s done:

I often have to increase the size of a virtual disk on a virtual machine. But I always seem to forget how to do it. I guess I have done it over a 100 times and I cannot remember exactly how I did it. So this blog entry is to help people on how to do this and as a reminder to myself.

This example is done on a virtual machine with CentOS 6, but it can be done on every Linux. And in the fdisk examples I have left out some of the not to interesting lines.

After upgrading my MySQL database server from version 5.0.95 to 5.1.61 I suddenly got these errors in the backup logging.

Hmm, no idea what has happened. I hope I didn’t do something stupid.

Today the classic, and old, Common Desktop Environment (a.k.a. CDE) was released into the Open Source world.

You can get the very alpha version at SourceForge.

I haven’t been able to get a running version by now, but I keep trying.

Good job, guys.

Working with git a lot I decided I needed some git status in my prompt.

I searched the web and some solutions where almost what I wanted and this one by Sebastian Celis came very close.

But it didn’t work with my version of zsh, because that didn’t seem to understand the =~ operator.

I also think Sebastian makes things over complicated and so I changed some things aroud.

This is what I came up with:

When installing a minimal CentOS 6 system, minimal really, really means minimal. After a reboot the network interfaces do not start, so network connectivity is non existing.

Looking into that I noticed that the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 contained

The lines that mess things up are NM_CONTROLLED=yes meaning the interfaces are managed with NetworkManager, which isn’t actually installed as part of a minimal install. You want a minimal install, you get a minimal install. And ONBOOT=no, meaning do not start the interface on boot. How stupid is that!

Today I released version 0.8 of We-Blog.

I created a Google project and a Google discussion group.

Version 0.8 is now the stable branch and 0.9 the development branch.

It often happens that I get into a situation where I need to know key codes of pressed keys. On my Mac that’s simple. Just use the Key Codes by Many Tricks.

But on Linux I constantly was trying to find out which key produced what.

So I ended up writing a program for that. I started of in the shell, but that ended up being rather tricky and unnecessary complicated. So I redid the whole thing in C.

I was trying to burn a folder with a VIDEO_TS directory onto a DVD. But in a way that it will start in a normal DVD player as well as starting automagically. And this all had to be done on Apple’s OSX.

I googled a little and tried some things and this is what I can up with:

I’m registered as a Computable expert and as required I do have a profile page on their website.

And now I get this (partially in Dutch):

Today I’ve posted a new version of the header program.

Nothing really fancy happened, just added support for zonefiles, in this case the Bind ones.

It’s available at the usual places.

I’m creating a Puppet Starter Kit with some standard manifests included and a complete set of documentation. All documentation should be written in Markdown and will be served by Markdoc. But I want to generate all Markdown files from the Puppet manifests, so I only need to document the manifest file. Generating the Markdown is not that difficult, except that I kept ending up with empty lines at the top of the manifest code and I wanted to get rid of those. Of course this should be done with sed, because the whole generation process is written in bash. When playing around with sed I found