So recently I opened an issue against VSCode. When I put one too many windows on my desktop it’s difficult to track what I was doing with it. It turns out the feature already exists, VSCode has the ability to label windows! We’ve all done it. You open a window, and another window, and another window. One is a scratch pad, another is a running project. I’m documenting this because its’ pretty handy! »
A common theme I hear when talking to operations people, and developers a like: continuous integration & continuous delivery (CI/CD). It’s too hard to get started. Too many resources are required to run it. The famous “I’ll get to it later” conversations begin. Passionate devs will paint a picture of their favorite tools, while those not accustomed to the benefits of CI/CD will almost always tell me all of the things they need to do before they can “get” to CI. »
Golang for Admins Vol. 2: Users The Setup If you’re like me, you probably found Kelsey Hightower’s talk from Gophercon 2014 Go for Sysadmins. If you haven’t watched it, go check it out. You’ll get pumped up and start wanting to pickup Go even more. So he briefly describes how Go is so easy to get things like system user information. A lightbulb goes on, and I think “hey! I can do that too”. »
Purpose I try to write all documentation with a purpose, and this is no different. My goal is to document some of the basic tasks a System Administrator, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or even enthusiast can pickup using Go. I won’t make you an expert, but hopefully some working examples will get you motivated to pickup other parts of the language. When I started down the Python path I felt the most accomplished when I could demonstrate a new library or tool I recently picked up. »
The Setup While double checking my website after some minor behind the scenes changes, I noticed an error regarding my connection. Firefox wouldn’t give me the expected “green lock”. Instead I received a warning dialog that the connection is insecure. Recently I had gotten a certificate from the awesome organization Lets Encrypt the Web. 5 Second Fix It appears when I first setup the Nginx server I specified the certificate from Let’s Encrypt. »
Initial Issue Recently I came into the possession of a Lenovo T series laptop. Everything seemed as expected: great screen (1920x1200!), lots of RAM and a smoking fast i7 processor. I installed openSUSE and got busy importing my “dotfiles” and installing my reguarly used tools & applications. The surprise came when a coworker insisted he had issues connecting to an external monitor via the mini displayport. As soon as I plugged it in I lost my display. »
Digital Ocean Code + FreeBSD FreeBSD Fun Thanks to the fine folks at Digital Ocean, it’s easier than before to get going on a FreeBSD 10.1 machine. I’ve been having fun playing with a few different images. I was initially interested to start seeing some of the common applications and services I use on FreeBSD again, and how their configuration would differ from some existing Salt states oriented for Linux systems. »
2014 & Chef This may crash and burn or be one of the best things I’ve done in a while: I’m almost starting over. One of the best ways for me to learn everything from best practices to common problems, quirks, or anything else that doesn’t fit the bill for official documentation is to run it yourself. I’ve had the pleasure of running Salt both personally and professionally last year. »
SaltStack & Minecraft This began as a challenge from my friend Russell proposed to for me to create a minecraft Salt state for one of our favorite pastimes: Minecraft The only assumption is that your Salt master has the minecraft-_serverXX.jar. I like to keep the version in pillar, since we can then easily update it. It’s rather fast, and also takes into account the daemon as an upstart service. »