After 10 years or 10,000 hours, most SRE & DevOps practitioners are YAML expert witnesses. We've written tens of thousands of lines of YAML - Kubernetes manifests, GitLab CI pipelines, Ansible playbooks, Docker Compose files, infrastructure definitions. We understand the format intimately. We know its quirks, its strengths, its …

The companion pelican-svbhack theme repo lives here.

We upgraded the pelican-svbhack theme to add a right sidebar table of contents. This enhancement improves navigation on longer articles by providing quick access to section headings. The theme now features responsive breakpoints, dark mode with theme-aware syntax highlighting, and progressive enhancement for …

The full webwords implementations have proper error handling, logging, and structure. But what's the absolute minimum code needed to implement the core functionality?

The companion webwords git repo lives here.

So you ran make build-all on webwords and now your root filesystem is 100% full. BTRFS doesn't clean up Docker volumes the way you'd expect. Here's how to unpotato your system.

The companion webwords git repo lives here.

The companion webwords git repo lives here.

Webwords now supports 42 programming languages. TimeHexOn assisted with this milestone over 2 days using a code agent tool.

42 languages. Same as the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Coincidence? Probably. But each implementation solves the exact same problem in completely …

Hey all I created ai.unturf.com and uncloseai.js over the past two weeks & this post introduces them to make AI more accessible to everyone.

The AI service is powered by the model Nous Research's adamo1139/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B-FP8-Dynamic. Our mission is to provide accessible AI tools for everyone, embodying …

Important: In my research so far, nobody seems to have a definite answer for how many unique non-overlapping battleship configurations there truely are...

In this blog post, we explore the process of generating all possible configurations of a Battleship game board using Python. Our goal is to efficiently generate a …

As a developer exploring the capabilities of Elixir and Phoenix, I recently conducted a performance experiment using a community-driven OpenAI client. The goal was to evaluate how well Elixir, with its powerful concurrency model, handles high-volume API requests. The results were impressive, demonstrating Elixir's efficiency and robustness in managing concurrent …

This guide will walk you through installing YaCy on Ubuntu.

By default YaCy is configured to bind to 0.0.0.0 but it's admin interface is only accessible by default to a white list which includes localhost and 127.0.0.1, since my install is headless on a …

letsencrypt certbot is now installable via snap (the deb apt repository is no longer maintained).

alternatively you can use certbot via docker if you plan to use the certonly mode.

I did run into some issues & I will document my workarounds here:

domains=(
    example.com
    shop.example.com
)

for domain …

Imagine your uncle just dropped off a TrueNAS Core server with root credentials, & a preconfigured IP Address in the subnet space of 192.168.1.1/24.

The note also highly suggests you to create your desired arch with KVM by making a cl0ne of ubuntu22, into separate VMs for …

Today's essay acts as a power-up love story for the underdog.

A living document & quickstart for:

• bootstrappers
• small business under 99 employees
• solo ops or devs
• entrepreneurs
• hackers
• tinkerers

You also deserve a quick start to a GitLab Server power house!

Regardless of my intended audience, this strategy should scale …

We GROW with Truth, Freedom, Love.

We scroll through the official GNUnet handbook, everything is covered in details, sections have examples. Seems verbose at first glance but also familiar .

Freedom of speech is under attack.

I AM not scared, we understand the technology we have and …

tl;dr if you just want something like aws s3 cp cli, try gsutil rsync.

At work one key item of team's sprint is properly utilizing and securing Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

For one of my projects, I'm learning GCP's Object Store called Google Cloud Storage (GCS).

I have prior …

Ok, so a month ago I changed employment and the new company uses GitLab exclusively for centralized code version control system.

This is my first time using GitLab and my first projects was integrating a dou/cloudmapper with a GitLab runner on a schedule.

After a couple weeks I've learned …

This issue blocked me for about two days and prevented me from collaborating with another engineer at gumyum co-operative video game studio.

The other engineer's environment was Windows and he was able to interact with collab and our shared project owned by our shared org. My environment was Fedora 30 …

try to log in as root locally, I needed to press ctrl-alt-f7 to get to a log in prompt.

Once logged in as root, I used the beadm command.

For example, beadm list and beadm activate <old-version>.

Finally reboot.

I followed this process and then got my FreeNAS server to …

Russell, why are you installing Unity? I thought you were an open source developer and homegrown video game engine builder?!

The TL;DR we are starting a video game co-operative called gumyum. The basic idea is to build a large video game company owned completely by members. There will be …

A pre-signed request grants a semi-trusted user temporary access to a private resource.

Let's unpack that statement ...

Pre-signed means, we bless a specific action on a specific private resource for a short duration of time.

Semi-trusted means, we have authenticated the user, but we don't trust them to have full …

Recently at work I transitioned our fleet from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. During the process I noticed an issue with our newer generation AWS EC2 "nitro" based instance types (specifically c5.2xlarge).

AWS was presenting my root block device as /dev/nvme1n1 and my data …

Each holiday season I find myself drawn to a side passion of mine.

While some build model trains and others create Christmas light shows with synchronized music you'll find me on my sofa where I build, explore, and tinker on my own video game engine.

Maybe the sound of wrapping …

tl;dr use a custom entrypoint in your CircleCI 2.0 config to limit Java memory to 1G.

The new CircleCI 2.0 docker configuration supports a "primary image" (listed first) which runs all the "steps" as well as zero or many "service images" (listed subsequently). The "service images", although …

So I've struggled for a while with the best way to properly setup a console script for my SQLAlchemy Pyramid apps.

I use the Pyramid Cookiecutter Alchemy to setup my projects and as such, I do not have a global and thus importable DBSession object. Instead my database session is …

For a long time I have put off DKIM signing email sent from my web services because I couldn't wrap my head around all the indirection Postfix requires to make it work.

Honestly, I put it off for over 5 years...

Today a thought sprung into my head:

"Could I …

The companion webwords git repo lives here.

This project shows how to code the same minimal web app called webwords in as many different programming languages as possible. It also provides guides for building and running webwords as a docker image.

This post continues from where we left off on the Minikube guide. If you do not already have a Kubernetes cluster, you should read that first.

Selenium Grid allows you to build a cluster of Selenium nodes. Today we will create a Selenium cluster with 1 hub and 4 nodes …

I found this technique after stumbling on Aaron Parecki's blog. You can read his post here:

• Setting a custom json 503 error page in nginx with proper http and content-type headers

Lets pretend you have an API and you need to turn on maintenance for a major change. All your …

A web page does not need to look the same on every browser or device. We cannot control the capabilities of a user's browser or device. As web designers, we have the duty to give the viewer the best experience possible. A user will come with what they have and …

This blog post assumes you already have:

• a Jenkins master and none or many build servers
• FPM installed on the build servers
• Node.js installed on the build servers

I add jenkins-build.sh in the root of the Node.js code repo:

# example usage: JOB_NAME=example-api BUILD_NUMBER=101 bash jenkins-build …

The Pyramid web application framework uses a request object to hold state regarding an inbound HTTP connection. A view must accept a request object as the first argument which makes it always available to our views and templates.

This behavior rocks, but Pyramid makes it even better by allowing us …

Do you have a Pyramid application which authenticates users and uses a signed cookie as a session? Do you want to build a microservice using another framework and allow it to use the same cookie and session? Me too!

First we will review a bit of Pyramid code which describes …

At work we mostly run Centos and I have some NodeJS services to deploy. I feel most familiar with Ubuntu / Upstart so this post serves as my notes on systemd.

In this contrived example, we define a service for our taco-api application. The taco-api source code lives in /opt/taco-api …

This took me about 2 hours to figure out, hopefully it saves you time.

/etc/sysconfig/network:

HOSTNAME=desired-hostname.example.com

/etc/hostname:

desired-hostname.example.com

/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg:

preserve_hostname: true

After dinner tonight, Carter, my four year old asked me, "If I swallow lots of air will I be lighter?". I thought about the question for a moment and then told him it depends on what surrounds you.

If you are surrounded by:

• air and you swallow lots of air …

At work today I needed an easy way to collect private IP addresses of every instance in one of our production VPCs.

I ended up adding a tool to https://botoform.com to perform this task.

bf --profile <aws_profile> dump <vpc_name_tag> instances --output-format json

For example:

bf --profile customer3 dump …

Five hints to save time during your migration from WordPress.

Library work around.

You only need a two lines of code to access package names and versions.

References to take you from filtering novice to expert.

Don't reinvent the wheel, use Botocores Config facilities for work with AWS.

Today I built a GUI and workflow around Ansible using Rundeck. Tonight I started diving into sending HipChat notifications and after a bit of research, I managed to create a custom notification template for each Rundeck project.

Modify your project's configuration file, on Ubuntu it was in /var/rundeck/projects …

This weekend I finished my first sprint on s3p which is a Python library and CLI application that manages release pipelines on AWS S3. I put a lot of effort into the readme.rst file, so look there for usage and examples.

The main purpose of s3p is to use …

So I'm working with an API (AWS ElastiCache) that offers mandatory pagination of results. I need to get all results, so I took some time to work out this logic.

def combine_results(function, key, marker=0, **kwargs):
    """deal with manditory pagination of AWS result descriptions"""
    results = []
    while marker != None:
        result …

I'm currently refactoring a script that tags AWS resources and I came up with this one liner to generate pretty output. It basically turns {'tag1':'value1','tag2':'value2'} into tag1=value1, tag2=value2. Here is the code:

', '.join(['='.join(key_value) for key_value in {'a':'1','b':'2'}.items() ])

Oh, and …

This post analyses the FreeNAS 9 code base and discusses the various places users may feel confident to hack on.

FreeNAS uses the following software stack:

Django

A Python Web Application Framework which complies with WSGI

Nginx

A very fast web server which may act as a reverse proxy server …

Mixed content errors occur because Nginx (the front-end server) communicates to the upstream WSGI server using http. WSGI does not know (or care) about the SSL session between Nginx and the user. The WSGI server will naively generate URIs and serve assets as http.

To fix mixed content errors, we …

I extended my IRC Bot Foxbot today to allow it to run canned remote executions on behalf of users in an IRC channel. This is only a prototype or proof-of-concept. Be very careful not to allow users to inject their own commands. Foxbot must be running on the Salt Master …

Sometimes you only want to see what has changed, and that is OK.

Create a file like this:

filter.py

#!/usr/bin/python

from json import loads
from json import dumps

import fileinput

stdin_lines = [line for line in fileinput.input()]

ret = loads(''.join(stdin_lines))

for minion_id, data in ret.items …

Note: I will update this post as I progress.

So the idea is to use Salt Stack's remote execution to communicate with all nodes and run the Nagios checks and collect the return output instead of using the NRPE client/service protocol. This reduces the number of agents running on …

My tools for creating automatic backups for various systems

I use tar-back in combination with cron to perform regular backups of all localhost filesystems into /archive/fs. I then have a central long term storage server that collects …

mysql-backis a backup utility script to dump (backup) and gzip every MySQL database on a host.

I use mysql-back in combination with cron to perform regular database dumps of MySQL servers to the /archive/db partition on localhost. I then have a central long term storage server that collects …

Over this holiday season, Christmas and New Years, I took the time to mess with some Game Development. I wrote a demo game engine using Python and SFML. I plan to use this post to track my progress.

Video Evolution Playlist

• All videos

2014-01-01

• User Input, Simple world, Scrolling
• Simple …

Python Lambda functions are very powerful but I often forget how they work or the fun things they do. This post will document how to use a lambda to provide different default arguments to a function.

We will use the human function found in ago.py as an example - because …

Special thanks to David Beitey for supplying ideas and python code for this update!

All changes are backward compatible.

Change log:

• added support for future dates
• added optional past_tense …

What is cache? I define cache as "a saved answer to a question". Caching can speed up an application if a computationally complex question is asked frequently. Instead of the computing the answer over and over, we can use the previously cached answer. This post will present one method of …

I just packaged and published a couple of python modules to pypi:

• ago
• miniuri

To install them, run:

Install:

pip install --upgrade ago miniuri

If you want to view their source code, look here:

• miniuri
• ago

I hope you enjoy them.

Update - I opensourced this script here: bash kira

I came up this this script to kill certain programs after they run for too long. This works like similar to a timeout. Warning this script is pretty harsh and kills the program.

#!/bin/bash
PROGRAM=replace-with-program-name
PIDSFILE=/tmp/kill-these.pids

for …

I recently needed to monitor an HTTPS API for response time and availability. At first I planned to just use the Nagios check_http command.

After gathering more requirements I learned that the API was protected by client certificate authentication. After some research I quickly found that no solution existed to …

Why does a Hash provide better message integrity then an Internet checksum?

Hash function and checksum function both return a value which cannot be reversed.

Note: This post shows an old way to modify the request object. I discuss a new way in my Pyramid add_request_method post.

Imagine that you have just built a wiki, blog, or cms web application that will be deployed multiple times by different people. You would like to provide the …

Read on for the one line fix.

Convert any webpage to an image.

Download all the images from a URI with this simple tool!

In a perfect world we should create backups but never need them. Although this statement holds truth, creating guest backups provides many more benefits.

The most common reasons system administrators restore from a virt-back guest backup:

• recovering from data corruption
• recovering deleted files
• recovering from a virus infection
• recovering from …

Please listen to my story before jumping to conclusions.

backup your virtual maching guests.

Solve problems and write code in your sleep.

I have placed bread.py, a python breadcrumb module, into the public domain.

The bread object accepts a url string and grants access to the url crumbs (parts) or url links (list of hrefs to each crumb).

Tutorial: Add a Breadcrumb Subscriber to a Pyramid project using 4 simple steps …