Puppet and policy - violator or enforcer?
A common challenge for an organisation running Puppet is how balance the desire for a fully automated and standardised environment, with the risk that automated Puppet runs may introduce bugs or revert hot fixes.
London DevOps Meetup
You’ve heard about Devops - you’ve followed the hashtag, now meet the people! The first public London Devops drinks meetup is on Wednesday the 24th of January, 2010. Come along and meet us!
A short introduction to Chrome OS
Google are everywhere these days. The number one search engine, a suite of hugely powerful mail and business applications, shopping, maps… but last year they seemed to move from the Software as a Service model to something rather different, with the release of their browser, and their operating system, Chrome. Richard Cohen explores what it’s all about.
How to build 100 web servers in a day
It’s common nowadays for sysadmins to manage very large numbers of servers - often virtual servers created on-demand in cloud platforms like Amazon EC2. How do you build so many servers and keep them updated - automatically, reliably, and quickly? John Arundel discusses the merits of image-based strategies and compares and contrasts them with an approach built around system automation and configuration management tools.
Advanced Dependency Management with Yum Shell
Many years ago, Red Hat had a (rather unfair) reputation of being a Linux distrubution forever crippled by a painful and clumsy package management system. “Dependency Hell” was the name used to describe the situation one could get into where circular dependencies arose, and the user became stuck. Dependency hell (which was always a bit of a myth) is a thing of the past now, especially since RHEL 5 where Red Hat adopted the powerful Yellowdog Updater, Modified (yum) which CentOS and Fedora had used for some time. However, just occasionally, problems arise which require some black-belt dependency solving. This article shows you how to use the yum-shell feature for just this purpose.
How to print every nth line of a file
Sometimes a scripting language isn’t the right tool for the job. I’ve been working on a piece of code that parses huge logfiles. The test data needed to be representative across 24 hours - a simple slice wouldn’t do. I spent a few minutes knocking up a python script to print every 100th line when I stopped and thought ‘There’s a better way’!
The Atalanta Systems Guide to Open Source Operating Systems
One of the most common questions for newcomers to Linux is “Which Linux version should I use?” or “Which Linux version is best?”. I’m also asked for my professional recommendations about which OS, or which distribution people should run, especially by people new to the idea of using an open-source operating system. I had this conversation again very recently, and felt it would be worth publishing my own experiences and recommendations.
DNS Zone File Fun with Python and Emacs
Sometimes we’re faced with a boring, manual, labourious job which really needs to be done, will take a fairly long time, and be pretty unpleasant. Whenever I’m faced with something like this, especially if it involves text, I try to make it interesting by setting myself the challenge of writing a script and/or using my editor to do the job faster than had I done it manually.