Category Archives: Automation

When puppetserver master CA expires

One issue with puppetserver CE is; the damn CA and key expire OK. That is obviously a good idea; but it is a real pain to sort out. Everything here is for puppetserver version 7.8.0 and puppet agents at versions … Continue reading

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Writing Ansible modules using bash instead of python

If any of you have been paying attention I have lately been looking into ansible. First a disclaimer, I use ‘puppetserver’ and puppet agents as since they moved away from Ruby to their own scripting language which is pretty much … Continue reading

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Quick install of AWX (ansible-tower upstream) into Docker

AWX is the upstream open source project for ansible-tower. If you are interested in ansible-tower it is obviously a good starting point, as it is the starting point for ansible-tower. It is also free to use, not just free as … Continue reading

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Differences between Docker and Kubernetes from a container viewpoint

This post is not about the differences between Docker and Kubernetes; it is about the differences needed for containers. And why you should not expect any container from dockerhub.io to run under Kubernetes. The main difference discussed here is that … Continue reading

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So you want to play with Kubernetes, try MiniKube

First off, if you have a few spare physical machines; or machines with enough resources to run a few well resourced VMs it is fairly simple to install Kubernetes itself. I have a fairly old OpenStack stack deployment yaml file … Continue reading

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Setting up a CI pipeline on Linux for your home lab

Setting up a continuous integration pipeline for your home lab may seem like overkill, but if you have the memory available it is simple to do and if you have an interest in these tools why not :-). And it … Continue reading

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Ansible vs Puppet, why I chose Puppet

First off let me make it clear I looked at options for automating configuration quite a while ago and chose puppet as the most secure option. I still believe that to be the case. The issue I have with options … Continue reading

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Generating a new puppet client certificate

This is for the community edition of puppetserver, although will work for all recent puppet releases. I use puppetserver as it is supposed to be able to manage up to 100 agents without having to hook it up to a … Continue reading

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Re-initialising a bacula database

OK, first on a well managed system you would never need to do this. Despite the fact my system I thought was well managed and had 250gb free in the backup storage pool rotating around quite happily when one of … Continue reading

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Is there a future for Docker ?

With Fedora no longer supporting Docker out-of-the-box (kernel changes are needed https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F31_bugs#Other_software_issues) and RHEL8 no longer supporting Docker (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/building_running_and_managing_containers/index) one may wonder if Docker itself has a future. The reason RedHat give (in the link above) is that they wish … Continue reading

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