Category Archives: open source

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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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Installing Fedora on the Raspberry Pi 3

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Will Foster

Recently I setup CentOS on the Raspberry pi 2.  Now we’re going to be installing a modern Fedora 23 desktop on the Raspberry Pi 3.  I’ve used the Pi 2 instructions from chisight’s blog post so original credit goes to … Continue reading →

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Build Secure VLAN Networks with ‘Shibby’ Router Firmware

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Will Foster

I’ve been an ardent user of the Tomato Linux Open Source router firmware, specifically on the ASUS RT-N66U home routers using the ‘Shibby’ builds.  They let you take full advantage of enterprise (and kitchen sink) features on the broadcom-based residential … Continue reading →

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Trick out your Terminal

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Will Foster

Here are some useful ways to enhance your operating system shell environment.  The first will give you a permanent bash history that’s up to date and doesn’t require a logout to update command history, nor does it get reset.  The … Continue reading →

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