Awesome : autostart app on boot depending on connected screens

1 September 2013 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Red Hat

Awesome is still my window manager and I still love it. With my laptop, I need to be able to quickly get my working environment when I power it on. The major problem I had was to avoid having the same opened windows at boot if I’m in the train, at work or at home. Of course there is no GPS in the laptop to detect my location, so I couldn’t set a rule for it.

Puppet: start to write your own module

30 August 2013 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Puppet, Red Hat

I didn’t really play with Puppet since a long time and a lot of things have changed. I’m currently writing a Puppet module for MySecureShell. And the thing is, it’s hard to quickly find the relevant information on how to build a module from scratch. I like to have experience return and what a chance when I saw a tweet regarding it, the same day as I started to write the module :-)

PackStack : quickly deploy OpenStack for production

8 August 2013 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, OpenStack, Puppet, Red Hat

Last week, I’ve assisted to a webinar organized by Puppet Labs. The talk was about PackStack which is a solution to deploy OpenStack in a production environment. How does PackStack works ? Some of you may tell me that DevStack do the same thing. But I warn once again about DevStack which is absolutely not build for production usages ! PackStack is a bundle of current modules for OpenStack available on Puppet Forge.

PuPHPet : speed up your Vagrant deployment

6 August 2013 in Databases, Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Mac, Puppet, Red Hat, SQL, Virtualization, Web

Vagrant is a fast solution build on top of VirtualBox. I already talked about it in a previous post. The thing is, you could do really more with Vagrant by adding Puppet manifests or Chef recipes in your Vagrant configuration file. For those who don’t often use one of those 2 softwares, it quickly could transform into a nightmare when they want to deploy softwares in addition of the OS.

Book : Pro Git

21 July 2013 in Debian, Linux, Mac, OpenBSD, Red Hat, Windows

Git : have you ever tried to play with it ? For several years I’m working with that fantastic tool. Anyway the biggest problem is : if you don’t work day to day with Git, you need a memento or something similar (like my wiki 😉). Also, if you use it for your personal usage, you’ll be lost when you will work with complex workflows. As I’m not a developer, I use Git to manage my etc configuration, my puppet manifests, my custom scripts…so many basic usage that really help me to win time as a sysadmin.

Weechat : a user friendly IRC client

24 May 2013 in Debian, FreeBSD, Hi-Tech, Linux, Mac, OpenBSD, Red Hat, Solaris

WeeChat is a fast, light and extensible chat client. It runs on many platforms (including Linux, BSD and Mac OS). I’m using it over a year and really love that client. WeeChat is: modular: a lightweight core with plugins around multi-protocols: IRC and Jabber (other soon) extensible: C plugins and scripts (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Tcl and Scheme) free software: released under GPLv3 license fully documented: user’s guide, API, FAQ,.

Simulate a black hole for a domain with Postfix

20 May 2013 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Red Hat

When you manage outgoing emails through SMTP, you may sometimes need to test if a service is able to send correctly emails and itself check that there were no issue during sending. You can create a black hole for a specific domain and Postfix will answer from the same manner as if it is ok. It also permit to test Postfix sending capacities on a server. To get more informations on this, follow that link.