Russ Mckendrick tackles AWS security group hurdles installing Puppet Enterprise, resolves by temporarily allowing all traffic.

Puppet Enterprise & AWS Security Groups

This week I had to do a few installations of Puppet Enterprise on an EC2 instance. Although this seemed like a simple enough task, I did hit upon one annoying issue. I was doing a Monolithic installation as it was just for testing, I had done this several times on Digital Ocean↗ and locally using a Vagrant box↗ with no issue at all. Reading through the documenation I had to open the following ...

November 15, 2015 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Russ Mckendrick improves blog speed, adds Gruntfile features for testing and deployment to Amazon S3 with Cloudflare cache flushing.

More site updates

Since the last post about the blog I have been playing with the blog a bit more, I have finally got a decent PageSpeed Insights Score↗ ; It’s annoying that the Disqus javascript is keeping me from getting 100/100 but considering before I started to tweak things I was getting a score of 85/100 so I can’t complain too much. I have also adding the following functionality to my Gruntfile↗ ...

October 11, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Pre-order my new book 'Monitoring Docker' for a comprehensive guide to container monitoring. Stay ahead of the game with tips and tricks

Monitoring Docker book

One of the reasons I haven’t been posting much on here for the last fews months is that I have been busy spending my weekends and evenings writing a book called “Monitoring Docker” which is being published by Packt Publishing↗ at the end of the year. It’s now available for pre-order from the Packt website↗ and also Amazon !!! Exciting times :D

October 11, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Ready to upgrade to OS X 10.11 El Capitan? Follow my steps and enjoy a smooth transition with enhanced performance!

Upgrading to El Capitan

Every six months or so I like to do clean installs of all of my Macs. I try and time this for late September which is normally when Apple releases its latest updates. This year its OS X 10.11 El Capitan; First thing to do is build a USB install disk so that , to do this I use DiskMaker X↗ . Once the drive has been created I boot from it, erase “Macintosh HD” and then do the installation. ...

October 3, 2015 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Upgrade your Digital Ocean droplet's kernel effortlessly. Discover the steps to ensure smooth kernel updates for enhanced security and performance.

Update the Kernel on a Digital Ocean droplet

A while I posted about a script I wrote to quickly bootstrap a Digital Ocean droplet. One one of the things I noticed while trying to install a few packages is that even though my script had run a yum update I was booting into the original Kernel and this was causing all sorts of hilarity when trying to build a Kernel module, because of this I added a few lines to my script to tell you if the kernel has been updated, and if so what the new version is; ...

September 6, 2015 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Explore hassle-free Vagrant box creation with Packer in Atlas. Harness the power of seamless integration for efficient box building and management.

Building Vagrant Boxes with Packer in Atlas

I have a need to create both some Ubuntu and CentOS Vagrant boxes for a project I am working on. Normally I would have created them on my local machine, uploaded the artifacts to an Amazon S3 bucket and then published them using Atlas↗ (formally Vagrant Cloud↗ ). However in the past month HashiCorp↗ have updated Atlas so that you can now build Packer↗ templates directly within Atlas and publish the artifacts as Vagrant Boxes, all free of charge. This is great for me as it means that I will not incur the hosting and distribution costs. ...

July 26, 2015 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick
Enable passwordless sudo on Azure VMs by adding SSH keys via Terraform. Simplify provisioning and management with seamless key configuration.

Adding a SSH Key to Azure

In my previous post I wrote about launching a CentOS 7 Virtual Machine in Azure↗ using Terraform↗ . As you can see from my original configuration I was adding a password and my own user. This worked well, the machine launched and I could access it as expect and sudo to root. However, when it came to using Terraforms built-in provisioner I started to have problems as the commands I was running need root privileges, when I tried using sudo it would sit there waiting for the password to entered. ...

July 22, 2015 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Unlock the power of Terraform and Azure for seamless VM provisioning! Learn how to streamline your infrastructure management today!

Terraform & Azure

As regular readers will know I really like the tools provided by Hashicorp↗ and today I found an excuse to use one. I needed to bring up a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure↗ . I hadn’t logged into Azure for quite a while so imagine my shock when I opened the dashboard, it’s not that great and the beta of the new one isn’t that brilliant either. It was so bad I tweeted about it …. ...

July 19, 2015 · 5 min · Russ Mckendrick