Tag Archives: devops

How to Setup Travis for Quick Ansible Playbook CI

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Will Foster

If you’re looking for a quick, easy way to setup repository-based CI for your Ansible playbooks on Github consider Travis CI, it’s also a breeze to set-up for larger projects and not that involved.  This takes around 10 minutes to … Continue reading →

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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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