SysAdmin

When puppet leaves an un-tidy mess

A while back, I had written a quick and dirty shell script to take a simple tarball of the /etc directory of my linux machines and copy it to an FTP server. Then, to make sure that the FTP directory didn’t get out of hand, I had written the following in my puppet config for that server that would clean everything up with the use of the tidy resource type. The code looked like this:

Drobo

I’ve been one of those guys for years now that has had a number of servers running in my basement. At one point, there were over a dozen doing various things and well…helped me learn for the job that I have now. But, time moves on and for the past several years I’ve had just one machine that I used for backups and a little bit of development. And in the most recent 12 months, that machine has only been used for backups.

How to get WordPress’ version from the CLI

Have you ever been in that situation where you have CLI access to a wordpress site but not through the GUI? I had that experience recently and wanted to know which version of wordpress the person was using. Mainly, I wanted to see if they were keeping things up to date. So with this handy one liner I found scouring through the web, you can do exactly that. # find .

Puppet: sslv3 alert certificate revoked

Have you ever had one of those days where you see on your dashboard one of your long lost boxen is no longer successfully reporting into your beloved puppet master? I’ve had a problem child as of late and I’m not sure if it was a security patch for openssl or if it was when the box moved from one virtual environment into a vCloud environment. But whatever the reason, I was suddenly seeing red when I would manually run my puppet agent command on the box.

7 Issues (and fixes) for installing Puppetlabs Razor on CentOS 6

I’m very fortunate to have a nice lab at work where I have a UCS chassis, fabrics, a few blades and a VNX to play with. Recently I’ve been working on getting our Razor implementation hammered out so messing around with all the good automation bits. Now, because its a lab, it doesn’t tend to fall into the same patching cycles as our production servers do. My Razor server in particular is an example of this only getting updated when I have the chance to turn a wrench.