Westwood, Denver is an amazing neighborhood with a large Latin / Indigenous population, rich cultural events and an amazing art / food scene. This has been our first year going here but it has been amazing as one thing my wife has always missed from Guatemala are the posadas around …
It began with a simple idea. I would sell my acoustic guitar, buy a bandsaw to compliment my other tools and build a new acoustic guitar with the help of my friend Fran. Well, sometime later and I still have yet to finish it! Between running off in an RV, …
So it turns out you can get away with a lot after you turn 40. When you start telling people that you would love to sell everything and go sailing, people encourage you. Then when you decide to sell your house, close the home based school your wife owns and …
Ever since I was a kid I wanted to play an instrument but it wasnt until I began working for Line 6 that I began playing. There is something about an instrument when you play it. Its not just the beauty or sound but its soul. This is why I …
So what do you do when your wife asks you to start a beehive? You use it as an excuse to build a custom beehive/camera and release a copy of the plans of course (ADD Note: video/plans below)! Towards the end of summer in 2013 my wife had started to develop …
This past year (2013) I was introduced to something that I never realized would interest me so much; bee keeping. My wife first introduced me to this passion when we worked with a bee keeper to transfer a hive of bees from our water meter in order to keep DWP …
After concentrating on learning Salt over the last few weeks I have been constantly surprised by how simple yet powerful the system is. When I first began, I started by setting up my base configurations (users, iptables, ssh, etc) into states and as I progressed things began getting more and more sophisticated. For the most part everything has been completely smooth but as with learning anything new I have gotten stuck from time to time trying to figure out how to do something or troubleshooting a formatting error I introduced. Luckily with such a great and active community as well …
One of the first things I needed to get a handle on when I began to use Saltstack was pillar and the various YAML and JINJA formatting techniques. At the time of this writing I didnt see too many beginning to end examples so I thought I would start writing about how I am implementing Saltstack. My intent is to build on this example and end up with a modular deployment using Pillar to manage all the aspects of my infrastructure. In the following example I will create an ipsec state that we can use to dynamically open ports for …
What can I say about Saltstack but, WOW! After only using it a couple of days I already have a working CM implementation and not only is it easy to use and incredibly powerful but it is FAST! This is not to say I still dont want to spend more time with Chef but after using Saltstack I find it very hard to peel myself away! As with anything I enjoy I thought it would be a good idea to build out some walkthrough’s for my own reference as well as to help anyone else getting started. To begin I thought I would …
While there are plenty of Chef tutorials out there I still found myself hunting around for one or two things when setting up my environment so I decided to write this article… Well, it is also for my own selfish reasons as writing these doc’s help to ensure that I learn and provide a reference when I need to set things up again. So! I have been getting started with Chef for configuration management and after building a local server or using Opscode hosted chef you will need to setup your workstation for knife and create a repository to store …