17 Apr 2015
Users of Amazon Linux 2015.03 may have noticed that Amazon updated the system Python version to 2.7. While they still provide fairly decent support for Python 2.6, this change caused several unforeseen headaches when deploying 2015.03 at work – particularly surrounding Spacewalk. Read on to see how I addressed these issues…
01 Mar 2015
In SaltStack, managing system roles in grains has a number of limitations. What other solutions are there? This is a follow up to The Grains Conundrum.
20 Nov 2014
So you may have noticed recently that Salt (or other Python apps that utilize PyCrypto such as Ansible) has been giving some warnings that look like this when running on Amazon Linux:
27 Aug 2014
Ever forget the DNS name and the IP of the Amazon EC2 host you were wanting to login to? I know I have. The script below will help with that.
26 Aug 2014
While I will say that I do not often use a Mac, I was recently given a MacBook Pro as my work system when I started at C2FO. While my requirements for a system are usually pretty low (a terminal, ssh, vim, and a web browser), I quickly found that the Mac DNS resolver did not behave as I would expect, especially when connecting to my office VPN.