Author Archives: Jethro Carr

10 months in

It’s been almost 10 months since Lisa and I brought our current house and moved in. Things are going well, having our own place and not paying a landlord is a fantastic and freeing feeling, but home ownership certainly isn’t a … Continue reading

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Baking images with Packer & Pupistry

One of the common issues when building modern infrastructure-as-code style systems is that whilst automation is great, it also has a habit of failing at the worst possible time. There’s nothing quite like the fun of trying to autoscale only to find … Continue reading

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Easy Lockscreen MacOS

Whilst MacOS is a pretty polished experience, there’s some really simple things that are stupidly hard sometimes such as getting the keybindings to work right for real keyboards or in this case, getting the screen to be lockable without sleeping the … 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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Puppet 3 & 4 on FreeBSD

I’ve been playing with FreeBSD recently and wanted to run Puppet on it to provide my machines with configuration. Unfortunately I faced the following error when I first ran Puppet with a simple Puppet manifest that tries to install NTP via … Continue reading

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FreeBSD in the cloud

This weekend I was playing around with FreeBSD in order to add support to Pupistry. Although I generally use Linux exclusively, it’s fun to play around with other platforms now and then, bit like going on vacation. Plus building support … Continue reading

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Puppet facts, json and max nesting

I use Puppet for both business and pleasure and my work often involves writing custom Puppet facts to expose various bits of information. Recently a fact I had written that worked on the development machines started throwing errors when run on our production … Continue reading

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AEM/CQ 5.6.1 package file parameter missing

Having the joy and “pleasure” of patching a bunch of AEM/CQ 5.6.1 instances at work recently, I ran into a weird issue where the hotfixes would refuse to install on a particular development machine. Any attempt to install the packages … Continue reading

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Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC in-home performance

Having completed the most important move-in task of wiring the house for ethernet and installing the Ubiquiti Unfi UAP-AC access point, I decided to run some benchmarks to see what sort of performance I could actually get. Manufacturers always quote … Continue reading

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