Day 8 in the #vDM30in30 When you’re beginning with Puppet, it can be difficult to troubleshoot and debug issues with Puppet code. What many people don’t know is that there are a bunch of useful cache files that can be used to help with this debugging. I’ve got a box I’ve classified as a graphite and grafana machine with Puppet, and I want to find out whats going on. Most of them can be found in the statedir: ...

Day 7 in the #vDM30in30 What I like… There’s an old cliche, “I’ll listen to anything…except rap and country”. I used to fall into this bucket, but then I actually realised that every genre has some amazing tracks and artists, so now I would describe my musical taste as pretty general. I tend toward the more hip-hop, electronic, easy-listening side. But since then I’ve broadened my horizons and will pretty much listen to anything. ...

Day 6 in the #vDM30in30 Header Source: https://flic.kr/p/HHgKu What is this? This is a post I wrote a year or so ago for SysAdvent 2015, but some issues came up and it didn’t get published. It’s basically about about welcoming new people to the world of SysOps and Sysadmin-ing, avoiding imposter syndrome and general tips about things to read and do to get used to the world of sysadmin-ing. SysOps: Welcome to the Club! Let’s talk about the old days. ...

Day 5 in the #vDM30in30 Cockpit is RedHat’s GUI for system administration. It’s actually installed on Fedora by default now, but it can run on most operating systems (there’s repos for Arch, Debian, CentOS and Ubuntu). RedHat are already using it as the main way of interacting with RHEV, their libVirt virtualization platform and it’s installed as a part of OpenShift, their PaaS for container orchestration. It includes a bunch of tooling for your standard sysadmin tasks: ...

Day 4 in the #vDM30in30 One of the things that comes up a lot with Puppet code is testing, particularly acceptance testing. Just like with regular code, you want to make sure that changes to Puppet are not going to break the standard use-case for your module. Travis has been a boon for open-source testing. For a while, Travis was only for the syntax, linting and rspec tests. But in the last year they’ve added the ability to have Docker running in a Travis job. ...