Linux 🐧

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer↗ locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/↗ : Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project↗ has been announced, developed and then released. The project describes itself as follows: ...

Now that CentOS 8 has been out for a few weeks I decided it was time to dip my toe in the water and update the CentOS 7 Packer scripts I had to work with CentOS 8. For those that don’t know, Packer by Hashicorp↗ , is a tool which allows you to build your own images from a number of sources and use them on a number of platforms — Hashicorp describe Packer as; ...

It has been a while as I have been busy writing, I thought I would spend some of my freetime having a very quick play with Ansible AWX↗ , which is the Open Source version of Ansible Tower↗ . I created the following Vagrantfile to launch a CentOS 7↗ server; Ansible AWX 1/3 # -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby : VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2" Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config| config.vm.box = "centos/7" config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v| v.memory = 4048 v.cpus = 2 v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "on"] v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--ioapic", "on"] end config.vm.define "awx" do |awx| awx.vm.hostname = "awx.local" awx.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: "80", host: "8080" awx.vm.provision :ansible do |ansible| ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml" ansible.become = true end end end This launches the following playbook.yml which prepares the CentOS 7 box by installing Docker and the other prerequisites need to build and launch AWX; ...

Earlier this week the guys over at sysdig↗ announced the availability of Falco, a behavioral security service which is built on top of their core Open Source sysdig engine. As is always the case when I try new things, I launched a Digital Ocean↗ Droplet running CentOS 7.2. Once the Droplet was available I ran the command to get the basics configured on the droplet; Falco by sysdig 1/6 curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/russmckendrick/DOBootstrap/master/do-bootstrap.sh | bash Once the Droplet was configured I installed Falco using the repo provided by sysdig by running the following commands; ...

Jenkins has always been a bit of an elephant in the room to me. Not being a developer I have always just shrugged it off a tool used for running unit tests, however, as I moving more into orchestration and automation I am finding the need for a tool which can run both tasks and unit tests, so this weekend I decided to finally take the plunge and have a play around with it. ...

I have been reading about Flocker↗ for quite a while and it’s been something I have been meaning to look at since the introduction of plugins back in the Docker 1.7 release↗ . But I have been busy looking at other parts of Docker. Since I had a few hours this weekend I thought it was about time and had a play. ClusterHQ describes Flocker as; Flocker is an open-source container data volume manager for your Dockerized application. It gives ops teams the tools they need to run containerized stateful services like databases in production. ...

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; ...

Around this time last year I blogged about Upgrading my servers to CentOS 7, the post contained a link to a script which I wrote to deploy a Puppet Master & Agent and some updated instructions for installing on RHEL / CentOS 7. As those instructions no longer work, and I needed to install a Puppet Master to have a play with I decided to update the installation script. After a little reading it looks like installing a Puppet Master with Apache and Passenger is a little old fashioned since the release of Puppet Server↗ . ...