Tag Archives: geek

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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Your cloud pricing isn’t webscale

Thankfully in 2015 most (but not all) proprietary software providers have moved away from the archaic ideology of software being licensed by the CPU core – a concept that reflected the value and importance of systems back when you were buying … Continue reading

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Not all routing is equal

Ran into an interesting issue with my Routerboard CRS226-24G-2S+ “Cloud Router Switch” which is basically a smart layer 3 capable switch running Mikrotik’s RouterOS. Whilst it’s specs mean it’s intended for switching rather than routing, given it has the full … Continue reading

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More Puppet Stuff

I’ve been continuing to migrate to my new server setup and Puppetising along the way, the outcome is yet more Puppet modules: The puppetlabs-firewall module performs very poorly with large rulesets, to work around this with my geoip/rirs module, I’ve … Continue reading

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Finding & purging Puppet exported resources

Puppet exported resources is a pretty awesome feature – essentially it allows information from one node to be used on another to affect the resulting configuration. We use this for clever things like having nodes tell an Icinga/Nagios server what monitoring … Continue reading

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MacOS won’t build anything? Check xcode license

One of the annoyances of the MacOS platform is that whilst there’s a nice powerful UNIX underneath, there’s a rather dumb layer of top that does silly things like preventing the app store password being saved, or as I found … Continue reading

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Puppet modules

I’m in the middle of doing a migration of my personal server infrastructure from a 2006-era colocation server onto modern cloud hosting providers. As part of this migration, I’m rebuilding everything properly using Puppet (use it heavily at work so it’s … 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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