A Tired Sysadmin's Ramblings

I’ve been pretty lax in updating this. I’m hoping to change that. Sort of a long-form relaxation exercise, going forward. I enjoy writing and I’m hoping to spend some time each week writing on a topic that interests me. Is it an ego-stroke? Of course it is, but aren’t all blogs?

For today, let’s talk about Linux on Windows. I’ve got a longer form piece to write on this, but not just yet. I’m sure many of my ideas have been written by others who enjoy such topics as well. But first, let me post a selfie. This is a fantastic resource to begin with on the topic. I like Ansible. I like it a lot. It's very low resource, pretty easy to learn, and doesn't require a client application on the remote machine like Puppet. Oh, and I only need to have ssh access and python on my Linux boxes for it to run. Does it have quirks? Yeah, but what application doesn't. Having the freedom to do a minimal install of the distro of choice, and hit it with a playbook to build out a machine to finish things is fantastic! Having it talk to various cloud providers natively certainly doesn't hurt my feelings. Now I just need it to talk to Ravello natively and I'll be a seriously happy individual. What the hell does this have to do with the price of tea in China, you ask? Well, one thing. Because I can run a full Ubuntu sandbox with Bash on Windows via Windows Services for Linux, I don't have to screw around with a jump-box to run Ansible. I can install it on WSfL and move on with life, runnng my playbooks natively against my machine(s). Whee! Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be running a Linux distro natively, but the needs of some personal applications, and my Steam library, don't allow for it. MobaXTerm works pretty well, but it has some eccentricites that annoy the shit out of me with the multi-tab interface. I'd love a good terminal app that allows for multiple windows, and command execution across a subset of those windows much like I can with iTerm2 on a mac. Alas, WSfL and TMux will have to do. For now.

Along with Openstack, I’m playing with Fail2Ban as well. Why? Because it helps. And RHOSP requires you to be able to ssh as root between nodes...damnit.

Seeing the unending scan and ban hitting my secure file, I got tired of it and decided to do what I’d done on other VPS’s of mine. Ban the shit out of Chinese IP space. Now I’m trying to figure out a good way to download the ASNs for China’s domestic ISP’s or, even better, the IP allocations for RIPE. Why? Because DROPping a /4 is a lot easier than a shit ton of /16′s and /24′s. I’d love to find a resource where the APNIC IP space has already been supernetted for me which would let me just drop those into my firewall. Alas, as it is right now, I’m manually trawling Hurricane Electric’s great BGP site. This means that I also have to manually supernet the blocks I get from BGP. For the moment I’m okay with this, and I’ll play with it when I get bored.

I have some RedHat certs and one of the classes I’ve taken, somewhat, recently was their CL210. I’m wanting to take EX210 and extend my RHCE a bit longer so I’ve been working on that. And that’s where the problems began.

I don’t have any RHEL licenses of my own. It’s too damned expensive. EX210 will be based on RHOSP so I’m hesitant to use RDO for studying.

Problem #1: Get eval license for RHOSP.

Solution: Go to RH’s site and get one. That’s easy.

Problem #2: Get RHEL eval licenses. See, in order to install RHOSP, you have to have subscription-manager installed and the box sub’d to the correct OS & arch channels, as well as the correct RHOSP channel (RHOSP 6 [Juno], or RHOSP 7 [Kilo]) depending on the version of EX210 you’re looking to take. That’s a bit harder. Luckily...

Solution: Contact sales and get three eval keys. No muss, no fuss. I’ve got a good rep and he understood what and why I’m doing and I got them the next day.

Problem 3: Install RHOS on your shiny hardware. So, yeah. You can go with the regular “enterprise” install, the “quick” (packstack) install, or the “evaluation” (single node) install. If you choose to go with the enterprise install, you need working DNS and Ravello seems to be a pain in the ass about working with this one. Sooo.....

Use packstack! Which works out well.

So, Horizon, glance, nova, cinder, and all the other fun little projects are running. Now to get it working and go through my CL210 book for practice and then take EX210.

Yeah, it’s been a minute. A few, actually, since I posted here. New things going on:

Using Ravello. A lot. Thank you Expert program!

Learning Ansible and Puppet. Trying to figure out which is better for my use cases.

Wow. Centos 7. You don’t say. And the project was bought by Red Hat directly. Huh.

I work in a RedHat shop, and we use RHN Satellite. Lately I've been looking into Puppet to help manage my home infrastructure. The appeal to it is that, unlike RHN Sat or Landscape it's vendor neutral. Yes, I know there's Spacewalk available for those of us who don't want to pay the license fees of Landscape or RHN Sat but, again, it's limited to Red Hat distros.

I'm playing with Ubuntu at home, both for learning and to use, and I'm wanting to branch out into other distros as well (my laptop currently has OpenSuse). I don't want an app that's locked into a single vendor's distro.

So, for those who've been in the trenches with it...what do you think? How helpful has it been for you? Is it easy to bang out a quick VM of some random distro without too much fiddling? My hobby use-case is exactly that, I want to be able to bang out a new 13.04 instance and not have to jerk around with the installer. Similarly, I may want to do the same with OpenSuse, or CentOS... I'm not against doing it the long way the first time, but I'd like to be able to script it out afterwards. If you're using it, or have used it, please let me know. As I said, I'm very curious and it's in my personal project pipeline.

It's [raining|cold|snowing|tornadoes|haling|raining fire and brimstone] outside so you can't get your run in for the day? No problem! Hop on the bane of your existence, the treadmill, and do this simple 30 minute workout.  Set it for 0° incline and a comfortable light jog (almost a walk) and go for a minute.

Each minute increase the incline by 1° until you're at a 15° incline. Now begin to decrease your incline by 1° until you are back at 0° of incline.

The two rules of this workout are as follows:

Don't decrease your speed until you absolutely can not go any further.

Do not hang on your treadmill. Keep your hands in front of you, above you, or at your sides. Hanging on the treadmill doesn't work the muscles this workout is intended to hit.

Strolling through the libvirt site, I see in the list of apps "Archipel." It's an XMPP based virtual machine manager. I may have to set up jabber on one of my machines to test this out, since my training curriculum uses multiple VMs (and I'm thinking about spinning a few extra up for various tasks).

I received an e-mail earlier this week with more information about Color Me Rad. No, it's not from them about my missing merch, it's about the photos from the race. I have to add to the plus column that the photos are EXTREMELY reasonable, about US$3 per shot (full sized digital) I which, in my experience, is very cheap.I don't know if this includes a copyright waiver for reprint purposes and IANAL so, check with your attorney before printing them.

Buying a game, I noticed a couple of others that piqued my interest. The first is one I've been watching for awhile Stealth Bastard is now a "Deluxe" edition with some add-ons. It's an old school side-scrolling platformer, from what I've seen, and looks to be pretty fun.