VDM30in30

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. ...

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: ...

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. ...

Day 1 in the #vDM30in30 So, recently I was working with someone who was having issues with hiera lookups not working. Debugging hiera can be a bit of a pain, because it’s not super good at explaining what’s going wrong. Luckily, Ben Ford, former PSE, now Education person at Puppet and generally awesome dude has made an awesome tool to do just that: hiera_explain It’s a way more verbose and explanatory way of doing everything, and the person I was working it loved it when I showed it on my test machine. ...