Tag Archives: linux

Automatically restarting GNU/Linux hosts upon hung storage

We recently experienced a weird and frustrating problem with storage reliability on our RabbitMQ cluster running on AWS c5-series EC2 instances with EBS storage and Ubuntu LTS 16.04. One of our three-node RabbitMQ cluster instances will experience an issue that … Continue reading

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FailberryPi – Diverse carrier links for your home data center

Given the amount of internet connected things I now rely on at home, I’ve been considering redundant internet links for a while. And thanks to the affordability of 3G/4G connectivity, it’s easier than ever to have a completely diverse carrier … Continue reading

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Easy APT repo in S3

When running a number of Ubuntu or Debian servers, it can be extremely useful to have a custom APT repo for uploading your own packages, or third party packages that lack their own good repositories to subscribe to. I recently … Continue reading

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Puppet Training

I recently ran a training session for our development team at Fairfax introducing them to the fundamentals of Puppet. To assist with this training, I’ve developed a bunch of scripts and learning modules which I’ve now open sourced at https://github.com/jethrocarr/puppet-training Using … Continue reading

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Building a mail server with Puppet

A few months back I rebuilt my personal server infrastructure and fully Puppetised everything, even the mail server. Because I keep having people ask me how to setup a mail server, I’ve gone and adjusted my Puppet modules to make them … Continue reading

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Faking a Time Capsule with a GNU/Linux server

Apple MacOS’s Time Machine feature is a great backup solution for general desktop use, but has some annoying limitations such as only working with either locally attached storage devices or with Apple’s Time Capsule devices. Whilst the Time Capsules aren’t bad … Continue reading

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Upcycling 32-bit Mac Minis

The first generation Intel Apple Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) has a special place as the best bang-for-buck system that I’ve ever purchased. Purchased for around $1k NZD in 2006, it did a stint as a much more sleep-friendly server back after … Continue reading

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The Proprietary Renaissance

noun, re·nais·sance often attributive \ˌre-nə-ˈsän(t)s, -ˈzän(t)s, -ˈsäⁿs, -ˈzäⁿs, ˈre-nə-ˌ, chiefly British ri-ˈnā-sən(t)s\ : a situation or period of time when there is a new interest in something that has not been popular in a long time : a period of … Continue reading

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Setting up and using Pupistry

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been working on an application called Pupistry to help make masterless Puppet deployments a lot easier. If you’re new to Pupistry, AWS, Git and Puppet, I’ve put together this short walk through on … Continue reading

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Introducing Pupistry

I’ve recently been working to migrate my personal infrastructure from a very conventional and ageing 8 year old colocation server to a new cloud-based approach. As part of this migration I’m simplifying what I have down to the fewest possible services … Continue reading

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