Tag Archives: automation

Automate RPM Builds from Git Sources using COPR

Posted on September 3, 2017 by Will Foster

The Fedora project COPR service builds/hosts free RPM package repositories and provides useful automation hooks for your Devopsing.  You can combine COPR and any standard Git source (Github, Gitlab, etc) with webhooks for automated package builds when your source repository … 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 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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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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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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Create vsftpd Users the Easy Way

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Will Foster

The FTP protocol has been around a long time, some of us remember using it fondly while others might shudder at the very mention of its name.  The fact remains it’s not going away, and it does what it’s supposed … Continue reading →

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Automating Dell iDRAC Administration with Racadm

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Will Foster

Managing more than a handful of Dell servers becomes cumbersome using the iDRAC web interface.  This is especially painful with several hundred servers or more.  Luckily Dell provides CLI tools you can use with XML templates to automate provisioning and … Continue reading →

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Create OpenStack Users the Easy Way

Posted on August 8, 2015 by Will Foster

When you’ve created more than one OpenStack user via the CLI or Horizon dashboard it gets old really quick.  It’s a good idea to automate it or use a tool to do the job for you.

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