Configuring a VPC at AWS isn’t particularly intuitive. A short how-to.

December 04, 2017 • Read more…

It’s somewhat common to have what’s known as a “jump host” serve as an SSH gateway to a remote network. You use ssh to log into the jump host (or “jump server”) and from there use ssh to log into an internal host that’s not directly accessible from the Internet.

With the release of ssh version 7.3, the OpenSSH folks made it easier to do the jump and internal login in one step.

November 02, 2017 • Read more…

A brief conversation with John Tierney about educational superiority complexes.

May 25, 2017 • Read more…

Ubuntu 16.04 has native support for ZFS, which means that VMs may start to use ZFS for non-root filesystems. Here’s a cookbook for expanding those filesystems. In OpenStack, the ZFS filesystem must be exported before this can be done, but at AWS it can be done without downtime.

May 16, 2017 • Read more…

I’m in the process of learning about and porting some rules to Puppet 4.9. One task that had eluded me was integrating custom Hiera data into modules.

March 31, 2017 • Read more…

Given a directory (e.g., ~/src) with a bunch of git and/or subversion repositories, refreshing them all is a script away.

February 01, 2017 • Read more…

Creating PXE-friendly hexadecimal file names.

December 16, 2016 • Read more…

A quick summary of Glacier operations using the aws command-line tool.

September 23, 2016 • Read more…

Access control on Amazon S3 is subtle and complex. Here’s a high-level overview of the access controls that can be placed on S3 buckets and objects.

September 07, 2016 • Read more…

How to use SCL to install non-standard versions of Red Hat-packaged software.

August 29, 2016 • Read more…

Understanding the time/date formatting routines Hugo inherits from Go.

August 24, 2016 • Read more…

An OpenStack Swift object-storage container is usually available only to users in the project in which the container was created, but Swift has an access-control mechanism that allows subtle permission sets to be constructed.

August 11, 2016 • Read more…

If you’re an OpenStack administrator or power user, there’s a good chance you need to use the OpenStack command-line tools within multiple projects. Here’s a bash script to help you move between projects.

August 11, 2016 • Read more…

I was perusing the instructions to setup Heat, the OpenStack orchestration service, and found myself unable to use the openstack domain command.

July 26, 2016 • Read more…

Congratulations! You’ve setup OpenStack and you can get to its web interface.

Now what?

July 18, 2016 • Read more…