tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-299170232024-10-07T00:45:15.860-04:00stuff i'm working on. current project: chef!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-70457475811438712952014-04-05T10:32:00.000-04:002014-04-26T15:38:05.204-04:00

Last time on "Enabling Markdown on your apache webserver": I created a perl CGI handler to render Markdown into HTML I updated (rewrote) the CGI handler to use ruby and the redcarpet gem. And now, the exciting conclusion.... I've updated my CGI handler yet again with a few new features and I've posted it on my GitHub account, in the docs-on-clearance repo (get 'em cheap while they're all

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-31737421727645288452014-03-27T13:02:00.001-04:002014-03-27T13:02:48.983-04:00

As part of a datacenter to cloud migration for $WORK I recently needed to move our Icinga install to AWS. However, there is no current Icinga package for Amazon Linux. There exists a set of rpms when using rpmforge, but Amazon Linux is already setup for EPEL instead. The way forward? Build the rpms. It actually wasn't very hard at all. I spun up a builder instance, built the rpms, copied them to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-7708230060218152002014-02-03T12:12:00.003-05:002014-02-03T12:12:46.311-05:00

From the venerable xkcd:

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-36848862897963944872013-10-07T14:07:00.002-04:002014-04-06T16:43:54.999-04:00

In a previous post I enabled previewing of Markdown formatted documents using the Text::Markdown perl module. However simple that module was to implement, it only implemented daringfireball markdown. Things at $WORK have ramped up the adoption of Markdown and the atrophied standard is not enough. So, I've had to find another renderer. Started by looking at how GitHub renders

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-12077324485827841072013-07-22T11:53:00.000-04:002013-09-03T21:00:05.134-04:00

A previous post detailed on how to build a .deb file for a perl module on Ubuntu. However, I needed the updated module as a .rpm on an Amazon Linux system, so I created the procedure for that OS as well. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. # install general dependencies of Net::Amazon::EC2 sudo yum --enablerepo=epel install \ perl-Net-Amazon-EC2 perl-File-Slurp perl-DBI

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-53993188934977406272013-07-09T13:43:00.000-04:002013-07-09T13:43:51.549-04:00

Found this awesome stackoverflow answer and had to write it up as a note to myself: ./foobar.pl > >( logger -t stdout ) 2> >( logger -t stderr ) Specifically, I hope to use this to replicate all EBS snapshots taken on an instance, e.g.: ec2-consistent-snapshot > >( ec2-replicate-snapshots ) 2> >( logger -t $PROGNAME )

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-70269135674170329282013-07-08T16:59:00.000-04:002013-07-08T16:59:31.471-04:00

I recently had a need to update an Ubuntu perl module for a client at $WORK. Specifically I needed to update the Net::Amazon::EC2 module to version 0.23 to support tagging of AWS resources. Looking at CPAN, the library went un-maintained for close to 3 years before a new author picked it up. Things are looking up though as it seems this fall's release of Ubuntu will likely have the new package.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-68491030488275735202013-03-05T11:23:00.001-05:002013-03-05T11:23:17.860-05:00

My latest project at work has been to get a Chef installation going for a client who is migrating a site from a traditional datacenter to Amazon Web Services. And part of the unique snowflake of a deploy process for this application is that it must be restarted on every deploy because the config files are included in the deploy - apache's httpd.conf, tomcat's server.xml, etc. etc. Most

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-27768647596318757882013-02-28T16:22:00.001-05:002013-02-28T16:22:15.113-05:00

Whoops! The self-signed certificate on the corporate Cisco ASA 5520 firewall expired a month ago and now it needs to be updated. However, we have a legitimate wildcard certificate issued from GeoTrust, so I figured out how to re-use that cert on the ASA by converting it with openssl into a format that it likes. Here are the steps: 1. convert all certs and keys to PEM format mkdir asa

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-4997668583225958832013-02-06T16:41:00.002-05:002013-02-06T16:41:32.735-05:00

This is my fourth post on getting Mageia2 running on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud. See my first post in the series for an overview. In the last post, I addressed the problem of having only a test kernel by tweaking the Mageia kernel SRPM and creating a gzipped kernel that can be used with the version of PV-GRUB supplied by Amazon. Now I'll walk through the steps of building an EBS

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-30953730769906557862012-12-21T10:35:00.002-05:002012-12-21T10:35:44.662-05:00

Ubuntu tweak #2 - diediedie nano die! $ sudo update-alternatives --config editor There are 4 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor). Selection Path Priority Status ------------------------------------------------------------ * 0 /bin/nano 40 auto mode 1 /bin/ed -100 manual mode 2

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-43017859382800724632012-12-20T15:24:00.004-05:002012-12-20T15:25:11.201-05:00

I have recently converted my work desktop to Ubuntu 12.10. Most things were better, but I was seeing horrible DNS lag from dnsmasq. To disable it, I've done the following: sudo vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf # comment out dns=dnsmasq sudo restart network-manager This will regenerate your resolv.conf and you'll see your DNS servers directly and not localhost.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-55447953444292968762012-12-11T23:20:00.000-05:002013-01-18T10:54:20.833-05:00

This is my third post on getting Mageia2 running on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud. See my first post in the series for an overview. In my last post I described how to create and upload an AMI that allows you to run Mageia2 on EC2. There were two issues with that method: The EC2 instances are using a one-off unverified kernel, obtained for testing purposes only. The instances

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-73082877667925692052012-12-05T11:29:00.000-05:002012-12-05T11:33:17.853-05:00

This is my second post on getting Mageia2 running on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud. See my first post in the series for an overview. The first step to creating a Mageia2 install on EC2 is to have a local Mageia2 system as your seed setup. Why? Because you must use urpmi, the Mageia package installer. It is equivalent to apt-get in Ubuntu or yum in CentOS/RHEL/Amazon Linux. Yes,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-31263821918666300222012-11-27T09:41:00.000-05:002013-02-07T22:29:30.169-05:00

At $WORK, we make the claim that as a client's systems oversight service, we are "distribution agnostic" - meaning we'll help you out regardless of what Linux distribution you're running. Most of the time, we work with Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS or Amazon Linux. However, a client recently decided on running Mageia2 GNU/Linux on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud, so I had to pick up the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-21220480202182211212012-10-26T12:24:00.000-04:002014-04-06T16:43:41.325-04:00

At $WORK, we're toying with moving all documentation with Markdown and git. To do that I needed to be able to render it locally to preview before pushing to GitHub, Bitbucket or another yet-to-be-determined repository. This setup was rather quick, easy and painless. Here's the steps: 1. Install Text::Markdown as your converter. The perl-Text-Markdown RPM was in the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-624347904512525942012-08-23T17:52:00.001-04:002012-08-23T17:52:21.786-04:00

I recently found this script recently to build a solr rpm and I love how it simply solves so many problems with RPM packaging with a few defines. Here's my slightly modified version for building an apache package, which leaves the SOURCES directory untouched and keeps a log of the build so you can go back and review it later: #!/bin/sh -x rm -rf BUILD RPMS SRPMS tmp || true mkdir -p

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-39497609657677880812012-07-11T12:30:00.000-04:002012-07-11T12:34:29.621-04:00

This week I was able to finally finish some python code I've been writing for $WORK - a script to rotate webserver logs directly to S3. This task was similar to something I'd done a long, LONG time ago (14 years since the first rev!) in a programming language far, far away. I had a much bigger chip on my shoulder then -  site analytics really isn't done with log parsing anymore,&

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-9253065055647038172012-06-29T14:42:00.001-04:002013-02-10T22:32:21.371-05:00

I've been meaning to try this for a while to see how it goes - use LVM2 to take an "instantaneous" snapshot of an EBS volume and then let AWS take it's time. I found LVM wasn't as quick as I'd like. Also, I have performance tested this either, so I don't know how bad the latency will be. Either way, I think it's an easy way to get a consistent backup: # prep export MYAZ="us-east-1a"

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-26862564773045848592011-12-29T17:20:00.000-05:002012-01-10T09:35:07.207-05:00

Now that I'm moved into the new office for $WORK, I had to diagnose some phone issues with our new Asterisk based PBX-in-a-Flash phone system. Thankfully, the new office setup is better in a few ways: All jacks in the office are active, with PoE All the switches are the same model number, Cisco WS-C3560G-48PS All the phones are the same model, Cisco SPA504G After tweaking some SIP

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-40082808715705242752011-05-17T23:20:00.002-04:002011-05-17T23:30:28.375-04:00

ESR's UNIX Koans are always worth reading again... be enlightened!

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-82561976178421463952011-04-22T19:28:00.005-04:002011-04-22T19:37:59.767-04:00

Found a useful nugget in the rsync FAQ: if your destination filesystem when using rsync is a FAT32 filesystem you need to add the --modify-window=1 option due to problems with the modified times on FAT32. A working example would be:rsync \ --progress \ --delete \ --verbose \ --archive \ --modify-window=1 \ /path/to/source/dir/ \ /path/to/fat32/dir/As always, remember to be careful about those

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-61831746357210672642011-04-14T12:04:00.004-04:002011-04-14T12:30:54.576-04:00

I've been using SSL/TLS certs for a long, long time - I've even had to re-issue my personal CA cert after it expired after 5 years. However, every time I've issued a self signed cert for an internal site, openssl prompted me interactively for the Country, State, Locality, etc. etc. blah, blah, blah. The lack of automation was exceptionally annoying. I knew the defaults could be customized so that

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-20000162534206327642011-04-08T13:44:00.004-04:002011-04-08T17:19:43.629-04:00

After reading a blog post about how to disable TRACE and TRACK for compliance, I've taken an extra step - limit HTTP requests to only "the big three": RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^(GET|HEAD|POST) RewriteRule .* - [F]It's possible you might want to add "OPTIONS" to that list or "DELETE|PUT" to be RESTful, but as with most implementations, YMMV.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29917023.post-32826104368186441932011-02-12T07:26:00.000-05:002011-02-12T07:27:21.995-05:00

After a break, I've decided to pick up a new project - learn python. I have a specific work goal in mind - create a small application to create, manage, remove, map, etc. CloudFront distributions that use a custom origin server, i.e. not S3, across multiple AWS accounts. It seems that boto is way to go. It has an uphill battle - the AWS provided SDKs are really quite easy to use and are well

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0