I remember looking at Ansible way back when I began building out DevOps solutions but at the time I chose Saltstack over Ansible. Saltstack was still a little buggy as it wasnt even a production release but it was amazingly fast and flexible. Unfortunately, with the Broadcom purchase of VMWare …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
As part of my drive to get comfortable with Python I decided to build a script to easily archive files to Amazon Glacier. Since I am cautious and perhaps a little paranoid, I wanted to make sure that the archives were encrypted. Next, since Glacier is cheap to send files …
Recently I was playing around with Netbackup’s cloud server integration and after reading through their manual and the related doc’s I thought that the subject could use a much simpler explanation and perhaps a walk-through. So far from what I have seen the Netbackup Cloud Storage Server seems to work …
Sure, I know this is more of a dull topic for most people as most of us have setup centralized syslog servers many times but when attempting to get Syslog-NG setup on Debian 6.0.6 I noticed that the majority of documentation was RedHat specific and I thought this topic could …
If you are running Exchange ActiveSync behind a Cisco ASA firewall you may receive Event ID: 1040 in your application event log. The event basically says: The average of the most recent heartbeat intervals [470] for request [Sync] used by clients is less than or equal to [540]. Make sure …
Recently I have been updating my scripting skills and learning Python. I have been using some of the great resources out there such as Codeacademy and the book “Dive into Python” but after getting about half way through I found a need to build some apps. So, please forgive me …