Switching from Mutt to Neomutt

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Will Foster

mutt“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 lists and emails.  Lately I’ve moved over to neomutt.  Based on upstream mutt, neomutt includes additional features, patches and active development. Continue reading →

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The Workflow Optimizer Visits Engineering

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Will Foster

lumberghThe 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. Continue reading →

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Tmux for GNU Screen Refugees and Vim Users

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Will Foster

tmuxI 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 with a focus on familiarity with vim bindings, useful tweaks and common hotkeys. Continue reading →

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Quick Fix for WordPress Table Text Wrapping

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Will Foster

wordpress-icon-smWordPress 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 theme formatting.  Here’s how this is accomplished, hoping it saves other people time. Continue reading →

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Create an HD Gaming Capture/Streaming Setup with Linux

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Will Foster

openbroadcastsoftware-iconTux-PodcastingI 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, let’s get started. Continue reading →

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Automate Nagios Monitoring with Ansible

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Will Foster

nagiosansibleInfrastructure 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 Nagios with Ansible. Continue reading →

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Fun and Profit with Reverse SSH Tunnels and AutoSSH

Posted on June 20, 2016 by Will Foster

openssh-logoSometimes 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 recently needed to establish a persistent connection to a new Raspberry Pi setup remotely where the ISP did not allow proper port forwards.  Luckily you can use reverse SSH tunneling and AutoSSH (automated tunnel persistence) and carry on. Continue reading →

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Secure, Distributed Password Resources with GPG, Git and Vim

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Will Foster

gnupgThere 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 and Git.  I use the GPG vim plugin for easy decryption, editing and encryption of files.  This is one simple, secure way for a distributed team to share sensitive data.  Let’s get started. Continue reading →

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Browbeat Is now an OpenStack Project

Posted on June 11, 2016 by Will Foster

openstack_logoBrowbeat 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 way to becoming a big tent project.  Browbeat also automates deployment of common analysis tools like ELK, Graphite/Grafana and Collectd with many more features coming along quickly. Continue reading →

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How to Make Killer Lasagna for Eight

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Will Foster

cooking_iconHere’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 about 5€ per person and will take around three hours.  We’ll be using minced pork and beef here, but traditionally you should also use veal if you like.  Let’s get started. Continue reading →

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Quick and Dirty Remote Execution with Ansible

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Will Foster

ansibleAnsible 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 systems.  These systems might listen on different SSH ports, or require different entry-point users.  Parallel SSH (pssh) can be useful but I find Ansible to fit the bill even better.  Here’s some useful examples. Continue reading →

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Automate 7 Days to Die Game Server Deployment with Ansible

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Will Foster

7days_icon7 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 or DayZ and early character progression of Everquest classic.  It runs natively in Linux, Mac or Windows.  Here I’ll show you how to automate deploying a gameserver using Ansible.

Continue reading →

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Manage Test/Development Linux VMs with qcow2 and Libvirt

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Will Foster

libvirtLogoTuxI 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 together, giving you a pristine, “gold” copy that you can quickly revert to after changes. Continue reading →

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Trick out your Vim Editor

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Will Foster

vim-iconI’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 it for a few reasons: the main one being that you’re guaranteed it will be installed on any server you touch.  I’m sharing my vim setup here and how to use the same one if you like it. Continue reading →

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Automate Deployment of the ELK/EFK Stack with Ansible

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Will Foster

ELK_IconansibleI 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, hope it’s useful to others. Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 24 Comments