Tools 🧰

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 Unfortunately, all of the repos which provide RPMs for Docker are out of date, the documentation suggests a manual installation↗ of the binary which is turns out to be straight forward: Installing Docker 1.3.x on CentOS 7 1/2 # Download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: ...

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. ...

On Friday DigitalOcean announced the availability↗ of CoreOS↗ on their platform. CoreOS is a very optimized Operating System which is designed to just run containers. While it has some very powerful clustering elements made up of …. etcd↗ fleet↗ systemmd↗ …. I decided my first step should be to do the opposite of every blog post I have read about CoreOS and run a single instance with the tools I am used to using. ...

I have been writing a lot about Docker↗ and how I have used it over the last several months so why another another post? Well, for a start it has a lot of momentum. Since Docker went 1.0 in June↗ there have been two further↗ releases↗ . Also, the ecosystem which has sprung up around Docker is keeping up the same pace as well. This means that there is always a lot of new shinny things to play with such as ….. ...

I have been installing and exposing SSH on most of the containers I have deployed, which I know is wrong. As I have been trying to do things in a more “devops” way I decided to do a little reading on how I can enter and leave running containers on my CentOS 7 instance without having to expose SSH or configure users. This is when I came across nsenter↗ & docker-enter↗ . As you can see from the following instructions and terminal session installing nsenter and then using docker-enter to connect to a running container is a breeze; ...

For the last few years I have been grabbing some we documented dotfiles from GitHub↗ but most of them have either ended up reconfigured my Mac to the point of it being unrecognisable or they have just been a collection of useful aliases. The I came across Bashstrap↗ , it was close enough to what I wanted so I forked it↗ …. You can install them using the following commands; ...

Google announced earlier this week that they are going to use HTTPS as a ranking signal↗ : We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web. We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging. For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web. ...

Last week I posted about upgrading my servers to CentOS 7, one of the main factors about upgrading to CentOS 7 was the jump in kernel version (from 2.6.x to 3.10.x). Also, it was so that I could use more modern versions core of software without having to worry about installing numerous additional repos. The funny thing is that all of the software I have been waiting to use have been available in both Fedora↗ and Ubuntu↗ for quite a while, so why have I waited? ...