Running Docker containers on a server with limited memory can lead to out-of-memory (OOM) issues, which can disrupt services and lead to downtime. This guide will show you how to increase swap space on an Ubuntu server to provide a buffer against OOM errors, using a real-world example from 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letsencrypt certbot is now installable via snap (the deb apt repository is no longer maintained).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 …

Chronicles of a washed up systems administrator.

In the basement, M. Bison (mbision.foxhop.net.), a T430 with a cracked screen runs quietly with his lid closed, acting as a SmartOS hypervisor to 3 Solaris derived zones and 4 KVM ubuntu guests.

One of these guests is the oldest of …

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 …

Your project deserves an asset pipeline.

I used project-fifo to launch the percona (14.2.0) MySQL dataset. I couldn't get into the MySQL instance so I reached out on IRC. Johngrasty, a friendly guy in the #smartos IRC channel, provided a command to display the randomly generated MySQL password emitted to the zone-init log:

cat …

I wrote these Salt States to install Mailpile on an Ubuntu host. Fun fact, it took me 20 minutes to write these states and they worked the first time I ran them. Disclaimer - I used a throw away server and wasn't concerned that buckets of packages were installed to the …

Lots of people claim that you need to upgrade openssl package, but this will not fix the issue.

The output of openssl version -a command …

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 …

When operations first became a thing, system administrators stood up servers using a base image from their favourite distribution. Things were done manually. Some administrators created their own distros, some wrote customised shell scripts to be run once-and-only-once to provision software and settings. This method worked, but it was slow …

A while back I explained how to Create your own fleet of servers with Digital Ocean and salt-cloud. Today I will extend that post and show how I deployed a test environment for Sensu, an open source monitoring framework.

Before I test out new infrastructure software, I always attempt to …

As a warning before we dive into things, this post is less of a formal publication and more of a stream of conscience.

My employer newcars.com has allowed the technical staff to host hackathon! Over the past couple weeks I have had quite a few ideas tumbling around in …

This post explains how to use configuration management (Salt Stack) to completely control a MongoDB collection. In our example we want to control a store's collection of plans.

First we create a JSON representation of the collection.

mongodb/plan.json:

{
  "_id" : { "$oid" : "4ef8b9e2be329f491d98f74b" },
  "cost" : 20, "description" : "development",
  "name" : "good", "count …

It's about time to learn the difference.

This state will create a user:

russell:
  user:
    - present

This state will create a user and a group. This also makes the user part of the group, and handles creating the group first:

russell:
  group:
    - present
  user:
    - present
    - groups:
      - russell
    - require:
      - group: russell

This state handles user and group generation …

Have you heard about Digital Ocean? They offer a polished user interface, KVM guests with SSD storage, and an API to interact with a cloud of hypervisors. API integration got you down? Don't worry, salt-cloud has already integrated Digital Ocean among it's list of providers! The rest of this post …

Salt-stack (salt) provides a solution for centralized configuration management and remote execution. One of the most basic things Salt provides is the ability to manage the contents of a file or a directory of files. Using Salt we can dictate the state of our minions and as a result we …

I started researching the best ways to use salt to provision minecraft servers. I wrote a salt state formula for the vanilla minecraft server deployment. The deployment worked out great so I decided to try my luck with plugins.

In order to use plugins and mods we need to use …

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.