VDM30in30

Well, here it is, Day 30 of the #vdm30in30. Here’s some stats on the last 30 days of posts: 23,343 Words 213,374 Characters 238 Sentences 29 Paragraphs 1 hr 25 mins Reading Time 2 hrs 10 mins Speaking Time Most used words: puppet 264 (4%) provider 116 (2%) puppetlabs 93 (1%) package 90 (1%) should 87 (1%) code 85 (1%) cockpit 85 (1%) opt 84 (1%) executed 80 (1%) run 79 (1%) Not sure how accurate that is because there’s a lot of code snippets in there, but seems about right: Each post was roughly about 750 words or so. ...

Day 29 in the #vDM30in30 Image from https://flic.kr/p/sqiJKP Let’s talk about the lifecycle of a Puppet run. The Puppet agent process collects information about the host it is running on including facts, which it passes to the server. The parser uses that system information and Puppet modules on local disk to compile a configuration for that particular host and returns it to the agent. The agent applies that configuration locally, thus affecting the local state of the host, and files the resulting report with the server, including the facts from the system Essentially, Puppet runs in an atomic fashion: Information it has is locked at the start of the run, and is not changed. At the end of the run, facts might be different, but the catalog stays the same. ...

Day 28 in the #vDM30in30 Image source: https://flic.kr/p/y1DUPj So previously I blogged about about how to ensure a /var/run directory exists before a systemd service starts, using the ExecStartPre steps to ensure the directory exists. ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/mkdir /run/jmxtrans/ ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/chown -R jmxtrans:jmxtrans /run/jmxtrans/ I took the idea from a blog by Jari Turkia. However, I made the rookie mistake of not checking the comments to see if things had changed and there was a better way, since the original post was written in 2013. ...

Day 27 in the #vDM30in30 I started off as a Java developer, so I was used to Eclipse and Intelij, quite heavy IDE’s with lots of assistance. After moving away from Java and into Ruby, I noticed one of the other developers was using TextMate, and it seemed much nimbler and easier to get things done. However, there were a few annoying things that about Textmate at the time (circa 2012~), such as Textmate crashing when you looked at large files. At the time we had a few larger JSON fixtures (not massive, 50-100kb or so) we were using for testing. A bit of a pain. ...

Day 26 in the #vDM30in30 A quick one this time, talking about a fairly recent service, https://dply.co/ What is it? dply is a pretty cool service for creating free temporary Linux servers. Essentially, it’s just a GUI in front of DigitalOcean. It allows you to quickly create a temporary droplet server (1CPU , 512MB RAM, 20GB SSD). Servers are free for 2 hours and expire after that time (you can add a Credit Card to keep them around for longer) ...