Attended PuppetCamp London 2014 with enlightening talks on Augeas, Puppet 4.x upgrades, and AWS management, sparking new project inspirations.

PuppetCamp London 2014

Yesterday, I had day out of the office with Danny↗ at the 2014 London PuppetCamp↗ . It was the first time I had attended a PuppetLabs event, though I have streamed plenty of video from past camps and conferences. It was interesting to see how best practices had moved on (answer, lots) since I first had my Puppet epiphany over a year ago. For me, and in no order, the most interesting talks were …. ...

December 2, 2014 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Curated a list of compelling reads from Pocket, covering topics from Google Docs reverse engineering to AWS scalability and Docker in production.

Reading list

As mentioned in a previous post I tend to send most articles I am interested in reading to Pocket↗ so I can read them when I have time. Here is a selection of the most interesting “stuff” I have bookmarked over the last month or so …. How I Reverse Engineered Google DocsTo Play Back Any Document’s Keystrokes↗ A Flock of Tasty Sources on How to Start Learning High Scalability↗ AWS Best Practices — Enterprise Perspective↗ A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS↗ Distributed systems for fun and profit↗ Post Mortem: The One Where We Accidentally DDOSed Ourselves↗ Docker in Production — What We’ve Learned Launching Over 300 Million Containers↗ SimCity That I Used to Know↗

December 2, 2014 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Curating a playlist from my recent favorite albums, sharing select tracks now available for streaming on Spotify.

Whats been on the headphones?

I have been listening to the following albums on the headphones over the course of the last few weeks and here is a playlist of the select tracks which are available on Spotify …

November 16, 2014 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Experimented with Docker and HHVM for our Drupal7 site at work, achieving a seamless transition and saving significant setup time.

An Experiment with Docker & HHVM

Now the dev team at work↗ have moved over to using Docker we decided to have some fun. An internal system we use is based on Drupal7↗ , the development version of the site has a NGINX / PHP 5.4 container↗ running in front of it. We have been hearing alot about HHVM↗ so why not try building a container and seeing if it our codebase works? ...

November 9, 2014 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Solved a perplexing issue where static files weren't updating in Vagrant due to a long-standing VirtualBox bug with 'sendfile'.

Annoying Virtual Box bug

I am in the process of building a Vagrant↗ Box for work↗ . All was going great until I ended up having to spend the best part of two days trying to figure out why static files (css, javascript etc) were not being served after being updated on the host file system. Turns out that VirtualBox↗ has had a “bug” for around three years where if “sendfile↗ ” is enabled in the web server you are running it won’t serve a file after it has been changed on the file system mounted from the host machine. ...

November 2, 2014 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Successfully upgraded to Docker 1.3 with process injection feature on CentOS, bypassing outdated repos with a manual install.

Installing Docker 1.3.x on CentOS 7

When Docker 1.3↗ was released a few weeks ago I was interested in using the process injection docker exec functionality. Unfortunately, all of the repos which provide RPMs for Docker are out of date, the documentation suggests a manual installation↗ of the binary which is turns out to be straight forward: Installing Docker 1.3.x on CentOS 7 1/2 # Download the binary & set the permissions curl -L https://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-latest > /usr/bin/docker; chmod +x /usr/bin/docker # Download the systemd files curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/docker/master/contrib/init/systemd/docker.service > /usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/docker/master/contrib/init/systemd/docker.socket > /usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.socket # Enable & start the service systemctl enable docker systemctl start docker # Install Fig as well curl -L https://github.com/docker/fig/releases/download/1.0.0/fig-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/fig; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fig now to check it works: ...

November 2, 2014 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Exciting weeks with a surge in Twitter favorites from a Docker-related tweet and mentions in Docker Weekly News and by CenturyLink Labs.

Whats going on?

Its been an interesting few weeks. I woke up one morning to find around 70 emails, most of them from Twitter saying a tweet I had been mentioned in had been favorited, this was the source …. .@docker, Fig, @nginx Reverse Proxies and #CentOS 7 https://t.co/Eenl8b1g9r by @RussMckendrick via @mediaglasses — Docker: Build 39X Faster (@Docker) October 13, 2014 …. yay. After spending a fews months talking about Docker↗ at work↗ it was good to get a mention. Also I got mentioned in the Docker Weekly News Letter↗ . Also this happened a few weeks later …. ...

November 2, 2014 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Reflecting on my smoothest MacOS upgrade experience with Yosemite: a journey from backup to clean installation and setting up my essentials.

Yosemite Installation

This could be the most straight forward MacOS update I have ever performed (I have been doing them since System 7.5↗ ). This time all three machines (iMac, MBP and MBA) worked first time with no dramas. As always the first thing I did was a full TimeMachine back-up (I have been burnt before) and then downloaded a copy of the Yosemite install from the AppStore. Rather than do an in-place upgrade I always do a clean installation, for the last three releases I have used the excellent DiskMaker X (or Lion Disk Maker as it used to be known)↗ . Once I have a USB installer I rebooted into the USB disk and then erased my primary hard drive using the disk utility, which is always a fun moment. ...

October 20, 2014 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick