I’ve pledged to play games and raise funds for kids at my local children’s hospital. Please visit my Extra Life Page to make a donation. Your donation is tax-deductible and will make miracles happen for families who desperately need them.

Watch

Visit my Twitch Stream and Follow my channel so you are notified when I go live on Game Day, November 5th, 2022.

I was invited to the Ford F-150 Lightning event here in Denver, CO. I got to ride along in the new Lightning and get an up close and personal look. They also had an E-Transit on site as well.

Test Ride

Let’s start with the most exciting part. After registration, I walked straight over to the test ride tent. Unfortunately, I was prohibited from recording anything inside the vehicle during the test ride. Here’s the video of the others taking a test ride:

Applying Netflix DevOps Patterns to Windows

Update: This docker image is now available on the Docker Hub as linuturk/mono-choco.

Do you want to create Chocolatey packages but don’t want to run a Windows server? Use this Dockerfile to build Chocolatey and do your package development without a Windows system.

FROM mono:3.12.1

MAINTAINER Justin Phelps

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y wget unzip

WORKDIR /usr/local/src/choco
RUN wget https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/archive/stable.zip
RUN unzip stable.zip
RUN rm stable.zip

WORKDIR /usr/local/src/choco/choco-stable
RUN chmod +x build.sh
RUN chmod +x zip.sh
RUN ./build.sh

WORKDIR /usr/local/bin
RUN ln -s /usr/local/src/choco/choco-stable/build_output/chocolatey

COPY choco /usr/local/bin/choco

WORKDIR /root

In the same directory as the Dockerfile, place a file called choco with executable permissions. The content of this file should be:

• MeetUp Link
• Slides

I’m using until to check the output from the rax module. Using the length Jinja2 filter, I can check if the correct number of instances have been created. This should retry the task 3 times with a delay of 5 seconds between attempts.

I was fortunate to receive a review copy of The Go Programming Language by Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan. The following is my review of this book based on my limited experience with Golang.

I’m new to Go. I’ve only been through the excellent Tour of Go. This Tour gives you a great hands on trial of Go but leaves out some of the more complex topics that are covered by Donovan and Kernighan’s book. I’ve made it through Chapter 5 which covers functions in detail. The book is well written and fairly easy to read but the subject matter can get quite dense at times. It takes dedication to read and may require you to look up concepts or terminology.

I will be speaking at Texas Linux Fest this year. My talk will be about Consul, the service discovery tool from HashiCorp. I’m scheduled for Saturday, August 22nd at 1:30 PM in Room 3.

Talk Materials:

• Slides
• Demo Repo
• SaltStack Repo

Here is the full schedule for the conference. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Today I was a guest on Rackspace Cloud Office Hours talking about my recent Ansible Certified Engineer certification. There is a great article on the Rackspace Blog with a Recap.

Here is the recording of the Hangout:

• Salt States in this GitHub repository.
• Slides can be found at this location.

Here is the recording of my talk:

• MeetUp Link
• Slides

In this third installment of my No Hassle Blog Automation series, I remove the necessity for running any infrastructure of my own. Drone has been replaced with a hosted solution at CircleCI. Their support is amazing, and their circle.yml format made configuration easy. Take a look at the first and second installments of this series.

Requirements

There are a few requirements for this setup:

• Rackspace Cloud Account
• Cloud Files Container*
• Existing Pelican Blog
• GitHub Account

* This container should be configured to serve a static site.

My talk has been accepted to SaltConf 2015 this year. I will be in Salt Lake City March 3rd through March 5th. I’ll be speaking about my experience deploying WebPageTest with SaltStack. We’ll talk about the benefits and gotchas of WebPageTest and SaltStack during this presentation. You’ll also see copious amounts of stateful PowerShell being used. If you have ever tried using Salt to managed Windows machines, this talk is certainly a must see!

• MeetUp Link
• Slides

• MeetUp Link
• Slides

You should also read my original article.

Templates are broken into several main sections. I’m going to describe each one of them so you fully understand the process. Follow along here: Ansible Tower HEAT Template

Description and Version

It is important that the Version information you specify matches the HEAT version in use. The description should describe the overall goal of the template.

Installing inventory plugins isn’t intuitive, and the documentation available on this process isn’t immediately clear. The instructions found on this page Ansible Documentation can be adapted for the Rackspace plugin.

It boils down to this for the Rackspace plugin:

1. Grab the latest version of rax.py from the plugins/inventory folder on GitHub. Raw GitHub Link
2. Place this file on your Ansible master. The location doesn’t matter that much, but convention says to put it in /etc/ansible/rax.py.
3. Make this script executable by issuing chmod +x /etc/ansible/rax.py.
4. As the user that runs Ansible, create the following file at ~/.rackspace_cloud_credentials: (Be sure to replace the appropriate values with your Rackspace username and apikey.)

[rackspace_cloud]
username = my_username
api_key = 01234567890abcdef

Target the rax.py script in your ansible run: ansible -i /etc/ansible/rax.py webserver -m ping

These instructions should be a nice and easy start to deploying Rackspace Cloud servers using the salt-cloud tool. Just follow along exactly, and at the end you should have a fully functional salt-cloud deployment tool.

Dependencies

I’m performing my installation on a Debian 7 (Wheezy) server, where my salt-master already exists. The following two commands should install salt-cloud, and all the necessary dependencies. This assumes you are already using the Python tool pip.

This article is in response to a request by Ryan Jung. Request your own article.

One of the disadvantages of using IRC over another chat medium is the lack of logging while you aren’t connected to the server. In this article, I will describe the process I used to implement logging for my favorite IRC channels.

The Environment

Pierc is my choice of logging bot for this article. It logs the contents of IRC channels to a MySQL instance, and presents an easy to use web interface.

This article is in response to a request by Shawn Laasch and Jordan Rinke. Request your topic today! This article will focus on Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers.

Cloud Load Balancers

Load balancing is performed by a device or service acting as a single endpoint to your application or site. This device then spreads the requests it receives across multiple back end nodes. There are benefits to using a load balancer in your configuration:

Let’s start by installing a dependency of the Vim plugin we are going to use. The Flake8 module will be needed for our vim-flake8 setup. As root (or using sudo), run the following commands:

easy_install pip
pip install flake8

The first command installs the latest version of pip, a tool for installing and managing Python packages. The second command uses pip to install the flake8 package. Now let’s configure vim.

I have now updated this script to use the new sync_folder_to_container method from pyrax. This method was introduced to pyrax in this commit. Make sure you update your pyrax modules before using this new script.

Managing a blog can be a hassle. Operating system updates, blog software updates, and server security take up tons of time. Don’t forget about scaling your blog if you get popular. Inspired by the Rackspace DevOps post on their new blog format, I’ve setup my own version using Pelican instead of Octopress.

Resources

This tutorial will assume you have two systems to manage your blog.

• Local Workstation
• Remote Server

The local workstation will be used to manage your blog posts, as well as uploading the content. This system will need git and Pelican installed.

I ran into an interesting problem today when installing the newly released Fedora 18. It was quite annoying, so I wanted to document it here.

Using the new installer, I configured my computer’s host name to subdomain.domain.com on the network setup page. After I finished the installation, I noticed my host name was still the default localhost.localdomain. I tried the usual tricks to set the host name, but all the following tactics failed:

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn based strategy game that has unique and fun campaigns and great multiplayer maps. Playing on the official server is fun, but sometimes you’ll want a private server on which you and your close friends can play.

Installing the Server Software

Most popular Linux distributions have the wesnoth-server package available in their repositories. For this example, I’ll be installing this service on a machine running Fedora 17. To install the Wesnoth multiplayer service, run the following command as root on your machine.

Strong passwords are important, today more than ever. Clever passwords like “Password123”, “hunter2”, and just the letter “a” just won’t cut it anymore. How can someone create strong passwords, use a different one for every account they have, and still remember them all? KeePassX is the answer.

KeePassX

KeePassX is a password database. It allows you to create an encrypted database file to hold all of your passwords. You unlock this database with a single master password. Since you choose where to save this database file, this tool has an edge over cloud based password tools like LastPass. It also has tools that allow you to generate really secure and random passwords.

I keep all of my music, pictures, and important files in Dropbox. You receive 2 GB of storage free (plus a small bump of free space if you use my referral link.) Once you install Dropbox and choose your folder location, make sure you put all of your important files in the Dropbox Folder.

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. Here is the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on IRC:

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.

Connecting to an IRC server isn’t hard. You just need the right IRC client, and a little bit of information.