Category Archives: sysadmin

Distributed Remote Backups with Git and Etckeeper

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Will Foster

Git is a powerful tool for lots of tasks, it makes a wonderful VCS that can drive easy utility and automation.  Recently I used git and remote repositories to deploy code & data fanned out to multiple locations.  Here are … Continue reading →

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Shell One-liners and Quick and Dirty Loops

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Will Foster

Sometimes you just need to get stuff done quickly and there’s nary a replacement better than a quick shell one-liner.  Recently I’ve needed to feed some large, multi-variable commands into an external program for processing.  Here’s some simple shell one-liners … Continue reading →

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Let’s Encrypt Everything – Setting up the Free, Automated CA

Posted on February 21, 2017 by Will Foster

Let’s Encrypt is a free, public SSL certificate authority (CA) you can use to generate and automate SSL certificate renewal.  I co-manage Trystack.org, a free OpenStack sandbox for the general public and our Horizon SSL certificate came up for expiration … Continue reading →

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Back to the Future: Converting a Server VM to Bare Metal

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Will Foster

It might seem like stepping back in time, but sometimes you start something with a VM and the desire for resources and usage skyrockets and you need to transplant it onto a bare metal server.  This was my situation with … Continue reading →

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How to Use Self-signed SSL Certificates for Plex Media Server

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Will Foster

Plex is a fork of the Open Source Kodi (previously XBMC) project from 2008, the Plex Media Server has evolved into what amounts to a free,  personal Netflix + Spotify that lets you stream home content to devices or browsers … Continue reading →

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Quick and Dirty SSH Key Management with Python

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Will Foster

Sometimes I need to quickly copy SSH keys to remote systems in a pinch.  I can do this with the Ansible authorized_key module but that’s not always available.  I might be on a random system and Ansible or external internet … Continue reading →

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Fun and Automation with Git Hooks

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Will Foster

Git is more than just an awesome, decentralized version control system (VCS) – it can also drive lots of useful automation by triggering actions to deploy infrastructure and services based on event and commit-based hooks.  You can drive a lot … Continue reading →

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Automate Infrastructure Docs with Python, WordPress and Foreman

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Will Foster

“It’s not done unless it’s documented,” says the wise Ops sage.  Frequently updated documentation is critical, it’s also one of the most neglected parts of technology.  Learn how we auto-generate server resource wiki data with Python, WordPress and Foreman.

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Automate SuperMicro Server Provisioning or Die Trying

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Will Foster

We use Foreman for systems provisioning and recently received a large shipment of Supermicro for Ceph.  Out of the box they were a lot of trouble to get integrated/automated at the same level of our Dell gear but we managed, … Continue reading →

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Switching from Mutt to Neomutt

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Will Foster

“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less,” so says mutt author Michael Elkins.  This is true for me over the last 10years as mutt along with offlineimap and notmuch allowed me battle the unwieldy, barbarous deluge of mailing … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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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