Tag Archives: sysadmin

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, ansible CI, Ansible Playbook CI, CI, continuous integration, devops, github, How to setup Ansible CI, sysadmin, travis, travis ci, Travis CI Guide Ansible | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged devops, etckeeper, etckeeper linux guide, git, linux, linux git backups, linux git branches, remote, sysadmin | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged bash, for loop, linux, loops, shell, shell example linux, shell examples, shell linux examples, sysadmin, useful shell linux tip | 4 Comments

Combat Unsolicited Sales with a Unique Office Voice Mail Recording

Posted on December 21, 2016 by Will Foster

Office voice mail has become a graveyard for unwanted sales solicitations for things I don’t need. People who need to reach me have many available methods. I’ve decided to take some creative liberties with my voice mail recording and you … Continue reading →

Posted in comedy, life | Tagged cold sales, comedy, fun with sales people, funny office voicemail, handling sales calls, how to combat agressive sales, how to handle unsolicited sales, humorous office voice mail, office voice mail, sysadmin, take the power back | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged automation, devops, git, git hooks, linux, post-receive hooks, sysadmin | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged devops, foreman, hardware, ipmi, linux, provisioning, servers, supermicro, sysadmin | 9 Comments

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged linux, productivity, screen, sysadmin, terminal, tmux | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, automation, devops, idrac monitoring, ipmi, linux, monitoring, nagios, snmp, supermicro monitoring, sysadmin | 35 Comments

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged encryption, gpg, linux, passwords, security, sysadmin | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, devops, linux, remote execution, shell module, sysadmin | 4 Comments

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged automation, development, libvirt, linux, open source, sandbox, sysadmin, testing, virtualization | 2 Comments

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged code completion, iTerm2, linux, open source, OSX Vim, sysadmin, vim, vim plugins | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged ansible, automation, devops, elasticsearch, elk, kibana, linux, logging, logstash, sysadmin | 24 Comments

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 →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged cloud, developers, linux, openstack, openstack summit, sysadmin, trystack | 1 Comment

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 →