Author Archives: Will Foster

About Will Foster

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The Workflow Optimizer Visits Engineering

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Will Foster

The Workflow Optimizer is part of a new sketch series about people who work as “professional workflow optimizers.” Today the workflow optimizer visits the Engineering office to help a colleague out with his workflow.

Posted in comedy, sketch, skit | Tagged comedy, sketch, skit, workflow optimizer | 1 Comment

Tmux for GNU Screen Refugees and Vim Users

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Will Foster

I use GNU Screen on servers to manage working sessions and perform long-running or persistent tasks. Lately I’ve been using tmux locally on my work desktop/laptop, finding it better suited for most terminal activity. Here’s how I set it up … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged linux, productivity, screen, sysadmin, terminal, tmux | Leave a comment

Quick Fix for WordPress Table Text Wrapping

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Will Foster

WordPress enforces sensible defaults for views and text wrapping that addresses most blogging purposes. Sometimes you want to work around these defaults. Recently I needed to expand text-wrapping behavior for tables to not break apart words to fit the default … Continue reading →

Posted in open source | Tagged CSS, tables, webdev, word break, word wrap, wordpress | Leave a comment

Create an HD Gaming Capture/Streaming Setup with Linux

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Will Foster

I recently created a dedicated game recording/streaming setup using OBS Studio on Fedora Linux. This lets me capture and stream real-time full 1080p video and audio from another machine playing video games. Read on for the hardware and setup details, … Continue reading →

Posted in gaming, open source | Tagged game casting, game streaming, gaming, gaming PC streaming, linux, multimedia, OBS, obs studio, obs studio linux, record desktop linux, record desktop obs linux, recording | Leave a comment

Automate Nagios Monitoring with Ansible

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Will Foster

Infrastructure monitoring is important and there’s lots of tools for it. I’m fond of Nagios – it’s very mature and customizable but it’s also a giant pain in the ass to setup. Here’s how to save time deploying and managing … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, automation, devops, idrac monitoring, ipmi, linux, monitoring, nagios, snmp, supermicro monitoring, sysadmin | 35 Comments

Fun and Profit with Reverse SSH Tunnels and AutoSSH

Posted on June 20, 2016 by Will Foster

Sometimes you just need to get to things remotely. Those things might be behind an unbudging firewall with no way to forward proper ports for remote access, or perhaps you just want it setup access to resources this way. I … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged autossh, autossh on linux, how to use reverse ssh proxy, linux, linux openssh proxy, linux reverse ssh, reverse proxy, security, ssh, ssh reverse proxy linux | 22 Comments

Secure, Distributed Password Resources with GPG, Git and Vim

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Will Foster

There are many tools to manage passwords and sensitive resources, some cost money or are closed commercial products. I’m going to show you how to create a secure, distributed and encrypted remote password repository using Open Source tools like GPG … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged encryption, gpg, linux, passwords, security, sysadmin | 1 Comment

Browbeat Is now an OpenStack Project

Posted on June 11, 2016 by Will Foster

Browbeat is an Open Source performance tuning and analysis tool for OpenStack clouds, and something I’ve been contributing to lately on my new team. As of this OpenStack commit Browbeat has moved to the openstack.org namespace and is on the … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged browbeat, browbeat project, cloud, openstack, performance, scale, tools | Leave a comment

How to Make Killer Lasagna for Eight

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Will Foster

Here’s a recipe for homemade lasagna that feeds eight hungry people (or less with great leftovers). We’ll be using mostly ingredients you can find at a local grocery store and it will cost you about 40‎€ (in Dublin, Ireland) or … Continue reading →

Posted in food | Tagged cooking, home cooking, italian, lasagna, lasagne, recipe | Leave a comment

Quick and Dirty Remote Execution with Ansible

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Will Foster

Ansible is a wonderful tool for orchestration, configuration management and automating a lot of tasks you’d never want to do by hand. Sometimes you just need to get in there and run a few commands across a bunch of different … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, devops, linux, remote execution, shell module, sysadmin | 4 Comments

Automate 7 Days to Die Game Server Deployment with Ansible

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Will Foster

7 Days to Die is an extremely fun apocalyptic zombie survival crafting game with much less emphasis on the crafting and more on survival. It’s a cross between the good building aspects of Minecraft, with the bleak realism of Rust … Continue reading →

Posted in gaming, open source, sysadmin | Tagged 7daystodie, ansible, automation, games, gameservers, linux gaming | 1 Comment

Manage Test/Development Linux VMs with qcow2 and Libvirt

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Will Foster

I often need to quickly revert virtual machines used for testing to a known good, vanilla state without doing anything by hand. QEMU provides a great set of tools to help. Here’s a simple tool to wrap all of it … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged automation, development, libvirt, linux, open source, sandbox, sysadmin, testing, virtualization | 2 Comments

Trick out your Vim Editor

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Will Foster

I’ve been a long-time vim user, dating back to when I figured out how to exit the damn thing. Over the years I’ve tried various vimrc configurations, plugins and looks and even other editors but I’ve always come back to … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged code completion, iTerm2, linux, open source, OSX Vim, sysadmin, vim, vim plugins | 2 Comments

Automate Deployment of the ELK/EFK Stack with Ansible

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Will Foster

I recently needed to completely automate deploying a full ELK/EFK stack and clients and didn’t find anything that suited my needs so I wrote the playbooks for this in Ansible. This was my first real foray into automation with Ansible, … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, automation, devops, elasticsearch, elk, kibana, linux, logging, logstash, sysadmin | 24 Comments

OpenStack Summit 2016 – Trystack, the free OpenStack Sandbox

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Will Foster

Following onto the previous Trystack.org talk at Devconf 2016, we presented at the 2016 Austin OpenStack Summit. Following the same format as the previous talk we covered some exciting updates around RDO Liberty/Mitaka, OpenStackID integration, datacenter hardware and network upgrades/expansion … Continue reading →