Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

The puppet downloadable VM tutorial

Posted on August 2, 2017 by mark

The puppet VM tutorial environment is available from https://puppet.com/download-learning-vm as an OVA file for VMWare or VirtualBox. The good news, once the disk image is extracted from the .ova file and converted from vmdk to qcow2 using qemu-img the resulting … Continue reading →

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Why do people use VMWare ?. It is a pain.

Posted on July 26, 2017 by mark

I actually purchased a license for VMWare Workstation when I was on Fedora21 as I needed it for a training course. Worked fine. Looks like the next time I tried to use I was on Fedora23 as I managed to … Continue reading →

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Puppetserver – my new interest

Posted on July 22, 2017 by mark

Why is the title puppetserver instead of puppet you ask, simply because as I am starting with puppet from scratch I have no interest in learning how to use the old “puppet-master” setup but will concentrate on the new puppetserver … Continue reading →

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Now whats up with Nagios these days ?

Posted on July 20, 2017 by mark

This post was going to be simply about how the only issue I had from upgrading all my core servers to F26 had no issues other than nagios. The title has been updated and the topic slightly changed due to … Continue reading →

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Decided to finally have a look at “puppet”.

Posted on July 13, 2017 by mark

When I initially had issues with Puppet I also looked at “Chef” but my issues with Chef were that it needs a damn site more resources to run plus to download the main chef server component you have to go … Continue reading →

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OpenStack Ocata install from the RDO repositories

Posted on July 13, 2017 by mark

Why a fresh install instead of an upgrade ? I gave up on trying to upgrade from Newton to Ocata using the RDO repositories. The upgrade instructions have now been updated for the Ocata release in the RDO documentation web … Continue reading →

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Using LUKS to create an encrypted disk file

Posted on June 21, 2017 by mark

It has been a while since I posted about the wonderful LUKS encryption tool. I’m sure all Linux users have encrypted disks and I have already posted about using it to encrypt external devices (all my external disks and USB … Continue reading →

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OpenStack – I am stuck on Newton for now

Posted on June 9, 2017 by mark

Issues with upgrading from Newton to Ocata have made me hold off upgrading to Ocata, I did make a few attempts. Attempt One After a normal upgrade from Newton to Ocata there were errors in the logs saying the placement … Continue reading →

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RDO OpenStack disk space usage, Newton release

Posted on March 22, 2017 by mark

This is for those of you who have installed the RDO release using the default loopback device for cinder volume storage and swift storage. It is a brief set of notes I will refer back to myself on where the … Continue reading →

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Openstack:Upgrade from Mitaka to Newton was a pain, but completed

Posted on March 16, 2017 by mark

The expected issues with a systemwide update where rabbitmq-server and all the erlang packages have to be removed before the update and re-installed afterward; but that was the only real issue (if you exclude the minor detail that config files … Continue reading →

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