Tuesday, Jan 21, 2020
I have discussed this slightly before, however, some background may be necessary. I build a relatively well used Docker container with Ansible. Originally this was all based on Python 2 which was the default Python that is installed with most operating systems. However, this was soon to change!
Python 2.7 will reach the end of its life on January 1st, 2020 The longer message that read out when installing using Python 2 was: ...
Sunday, Jan 12, 2020
The end of the year is a great time for evaluation and retrospection; and the end of the decade is the same. It often seems that time passes slowly and changes pass quickly but it is probably the opposite. Personally, I have seen a lot of changes over the past 10 years both personally and within work and this post is an effort to evaluate and understand them.
Marriage and Children How could I start without mentioning that within the past 10 years I have gotten married and had 2 children. ...
Wednesday, Nov 6, 2019
As you may already know I run a relatively successful (in pull terms) Docker container for Ansible; willhallonline/ansible. It has had around 2 million pulls at the moment, and I use it not only for Ansible in my local machine, but also for loading Ansible into various CI systems and testing the deployment of Ansible roles and playbooks.
However, I was prompted to think of the future of it by this GitHub issue opened python 2. ...
Monday, Oct 28, 2019
Normally, I try to write expressionate things inside my blog, about certain things I have worked on or found interesting. However, this is more to share that I was interviewed by digitalanarchist.com for DevOps.com whilst at GitLab Commit in London.
Overall, I found the interview really interesting. I talked about HeleCloud, what the role of DevOps does and a whole bunch about why I think GitLab is a great tool and how easy it is to actually deploy GitLab pages files, with all the bells and whistles of any Static site, but with almost no configuration. ...
Wednesday, Apr 10, 2019
Increasing disk space on the fly inside AWS is a joy to do (kind of). Especially compared to the challenges with bare-metal or on premise systems.
Understanding the Disks When working with disks, it is a good idea to have some idea how they work. Normally you would have a set of disks defined in you /dev system (for devices) and you should be able to see these added externally. ...
Friday, Mar 8, 2019
Scaffolding or structuring your Ansible projects mean that not only do you have a sane way understanding how your projects are put together but you can also look at being able to re-use and extend your DevOps projects. I have also created a project here that you could clone (or download) and reuse as you choose https://gitlab.com/willhallonline/ansible-starter.
In the below example I share the tree structure of general Ansible projects and how I use . ...
Tuesday, Mar 5, 2019
When working with projects that have dependencies on other projects using git submodules can be really useful. It allows you to basically add links to other git projects inside your source code, without having to add all of the code of the project until you need it.
However, managing those git submodules (from .gitmodules) can prove to be a challenge. I reguarly ship software projects to new developers with multiple submodule and this handy little script will open each of the submodule exactly where you want them without having to use multiple git submodule add. ...
Friday, Jan 11, 2019
There has been a tweet doing the rounds about how people are doing with managing their RAM. Generally speaking I have a couple of machines, varying from 4-16GB or RAM. As you can expect I don’t have many spare GB of RAM knocking about, pretty much ever.
# Wtf is eating up my RAM?
ps aux | awk '{print $6/1024 " MB\t\t" $11}' | sort -rn | head -25#Linux #sysadmin @nixcraft @UnixToolTip ...
Friday, Jan 4, 2019
Getting accurate results about the size and growth of your database tables enabled you to make smart decisions about partitioning and management of storage. I can guarantee that no-one wants to run out of storage on a database server.
Show the largest database from a database server This has the assumption that you have access to the root account on the database server. You can normally look inside /var/lib/mysql to get an idea of the overall disk space, however, you will likely get more reliable results from querying the information_schema table inside MySql. ...
Wednesday, Dec 5, 2018
Sending messages over the Internet can be fun (we are doing it now). However, testing that connections are correctly established behind a mask of firewalls, load balancers and application servers can be challenging. Netcat offers a simple way to test the sending of messages between two servers and it is already available on the majority of server installs.
Using netcat is relatively straightforward. The core thing we are doing here is using both UDP -u and listening -l. ...
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