Posts

When most people hear about make they think of compiling source code. While that is often what it’s used for, there are other good uses as well. Here’s an example of using it with Terraform/Ansible to build your infrastructure. Make has some advantages over just using a shell script. One is the native concept of dependencies. You can easily define which targets are dependencies of other targets. Make also has some idempotence baked in (as long as everything isn’t a phony target)....

Since Ansible 2.2 you can use binary applications as modules for Ansible. This means you can write modules in languages other than Python. The downside is that the modules aren’t integrated as well as if they were written in Python with Ansiballz. The binary modules only takes the filename as an argument which is a temporary file containing the JSON data of the modules parameters. I took the boilerplate code that Ansible had here and created a small module to generate a random password....

Ansible Tower has an awesome feature that I’ve talked about before called provisioning callbacks. It’s hard to beat their simplicity, one click of a button and you have an API endpoint and a key to use. However you can replicate this in Jenkins with just about the same amount of work. Coming from using both Tower and Jenkins, I currently prefer to use Jenkins. I find it a little more flexible....

So I had a unique scenario where we built a solution for users using Ansible but wanted to make it simple so that it didn’t require the end users to understand how to build an inventory or playbooks. So the solution we came up with was to build Ansible playbooks and inventories with Ansible itself. The users just need a single YAML file and then run a make command and Ansible builds itself the inventory, playbooks, and group_vars at run time....

In my journey to better my development skills I’ve been trying to write some small Go applications. I needed a sorter like uniq but on a Windows machine for a project I was doing. So I decided to write one. Unlike uniq the input does not need sorted beforehand. The program takes either stdin or can read from a file which is passed as the first argument. stdin: echo "test thing test thing other" | goniq...

Nomad is a job scheduler created by Hashicorp. Since it’s written in Go, it’s a single, cross platform, statically linked binary. It has drivers for Docker, Qemu, Rkt, Java, App execution, and a beta for LXC. I’ll just go over the exec driver in this post. To start you need to download Nomad from here. I stuck it in /usr/local/bin. I used Vagrant to bring up a server and two clients....

Reflinks for XFS are available in Fedora 27, so you no longer need to pull and compile xfsprogs from git. To leverage reflinks in XFS, you need to create a file system with the reflink=1 flag. [root@starscream mnt]# mkfs.xfs -m reflink=1 filesystem In my example I just created a file and mounted it on a loop device. [root@starscream mnt]# mkfs.xfs -m reflink=1 test.img Then I’ll mount it [root@starscream mnt]# mount -o loop test....