An example metrics stack with Collectd, Graphite and Grafana

Day 10 in the #vDM30in30 One thing that often comes up is customers or people in Slack/IRC asking “How do I setup X?” I often end up making basic Vagrant stack, as all the examples on Github are either too out of date or broken. I try and pin as many dependencies as possible, and make it as easy as possible to deploy, usually doing all the work with a vagrant up. ...

November 10, 2016 · 4 min · Peter Souter

System Administration with Cockpit

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: ...

November 5, 2016 · 2 min · Peter Souter

Running Puppet acceptance tests in Docker in Travis

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. ...

November 4, 2016 · 13 min · Peter Souter

How I accidentally helped find a showstopper bug in Ruby

Day 3 in the #vDM30in30 It all started with a hanging build… https://travis-ci.org/voxpupuli/puppet-nginx/builds/166701701 We were having an issue with a hanging build with mocked tests for Facter in the Nginx module for Vox Pupuli. Since I was the last person who touched it, I took responsibility for the issue and dug in. The code was a basic unit test for checking Ruby code to determine the version of nginx installed: ...

November 3, 2016 · 3 min · Peter Souter

Some thoughts on maintaining OSS that has an official "competitor"

Day 2 in the #vDM30in30 I’ve been maintaining and merging PR’s on the Tugboat repo since about 2013. I was looking to play around with DigitalOcean, as I’d heard it was a cool upstart alternative to AWS, with cheap, SSD cloud machines, very cool for someone like me who likes tweaking and playing with new operating systems. I cut my teeth on a lot of new Ruby testing and techniques, like webmock, aruba for command line testing and how to DRY-up repetitive methods to make code easier to maintain. ...

November 2, 2016 · 4 min · Peter Souter