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CentOS 8 Software RAID Monitoring
Sunday, July 5, 2020
My current home server uses software Linux RAID to run my two large RAID arrays. By default, CentOS 8 does not monitor the status of these RAID devices for you. It is highly recommended that you set up the monitoring of your devices lest you forget and have all your data disappear. …more
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Quickly deploying Python code to Lambda
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Lambda is pretty awesome, and we use it for a ton of things at work. I’ve deployed around 20 different scripts at this point, that do everything from monitoring type of tasks to a full Slackbot. Although generally we use Ansible to deploy everything (including our Lambda tasks), there are times when things need to go and they need to go now. For this I wrote a simple script that zips up a package that can be manually deployed to Lambda with all the necessary libraries and things your script needs. …more
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drone.io and the GCR
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
For the last week or so I’ve been evaluating drone.io as a replacement for our current CI engine (spoiler: we aren’t going to use it). Something that I ran across that wasn’t immediately obvious on how to achieve was pulling private images from Google Container Repository. Although there is a thread on the Discouse forums that touches on it, I had to do some testing on my own to actually get it working. Here is what I did. …more
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Testing Ansible AWX/Tower roles
Friday, September 21, 2018
As I continue to push forward the use of AWX in our infrastructure, there is continued need to test what we are producing. Much like any other kind of development, sometimes we need a local environment to test something. This came up recently for me in AWX because I was testing a role that modified the AWS Task container in order to provide enhanced functionality. I wrote the following little shell provisioner that gets AWX up and running quickly for testing. …more
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Using Nginx in front of AWX for SSL
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
I’ve got AWX deployed in production currently. Obviously for production, you need to SSL for authentication. Since AWX doesn’t offer this currently, and I’m not paying $20/month just for a ELB for this, I decided to slap Nginx in front of the containers to proxy SSL. This ended up being a larger pain than I expected because of the websockets. Finally got it figured out and wanted to post my nginx config for anyone else trying to do the same thing. …more
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Migration to Gitlab and Gitlab Runners
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
The Linux community, and the open-source community in general, was up in arms last month as Microsoft announced a purchase of Github. For many reasons, which I am not going to detail here, I agree with the general concern and outrage over this. Due to this, I have migrated all my repos from Github (where I was a paying member) to Gitlab. The migration itself is dead easy, but with this migration you lose access to other tools. This mainly impacted me with the loss of CircleCI. Enter Gitlab runners! …more
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docker-py deprecated in favor of docker
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Just a quick note that the Python module docker-py has been deprecated in favor of docker. I run a few Ansible hosts that run Docker containers for various reasons and recently they started to fail during their Ansible runs. Turns out that docker-py now fails during said runs. After some searching I found that this module hasn’t been updated in a very long time, and has been deprecated in favor of the docker module instead. I wrote the following small Ansible task to fix this on my machines. …more
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Unifi Controller on a Pi with Ansible
Monday, July 16, 2018
I recently moved into a new house (yay!) and had to get my network up and running again. I have been running a full Unifi setup for almost a year now and have been very happy with it. Originally I was running the Unifi controller in a container with the rest of my containerized set up. This was fine, until I moved and needed to have access to the controller, and the network, but didn’t have the entirety of my server infrastructure up and running. Enter the Pi! …more
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Using Multiple Docker Repositories
Sunday, March 4, 2018
Depending on the project I work in a multitude of different Docker repositories across multiple services. This includes using Google, Amazon, and Docker hub. Logging into each one of these services every time I need to push a container is a pain. Fortunately, you can set up your .docker/config.json for each user to be able to seamlessly use multiple repositories. …more
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Migrating to Lambda from Cron Jobs
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
One of my jobs (at least as I see it) is not only to automate infrastructure, but also to consolidate and simplify infrastructure. Too many companies I have worked at have small bits of amazing things, surrounded by loads of convoluted messes left by others. As we move more and more into public cloud infrastructure, in this case AWS, I started thinking about the things I could simplify using AWS only tools. The old way of doing things (as set up by the engineers before me) was to have loads of cron jobs, running across multiple machines, for tasks like taking EBS snapshots. This isn’t a problem when everything is humming along perfectly, but as soon as something breaks, the hunt for where it broke begins. My old strategy involved using the bastion hosts (those that sat on the outside of the VPC for access to VPC machines). But even this could be missed by someone who doesn’t understand my particular way of doing things. This also doesn’t provide consolidated logging either, unless you consume logs from every bastion host into some logging service. Enter Lambda. …more