Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Devops Needs Sushi

Using Veewee

With @dancarley and @patrickebois just discussing the origin of the name of Veewee I figured I still had that piece of documentation I wrote up for myselve flying around …

So with no other reason than having my docs mirrored on the internet .

1. gem install veewee
1. veewee templates

shows you what templates we have around ..

1. $veewee init natty ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64
2. Init a new box natty, starting from template ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64
3. The basebox 'natty' has been successfully created from the template ''ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64'
4. You can now edit the definition files stored in definitions/natty
5. or build the box with:
6. vagrant basebox build 'natty'

As noted this will generate the definition for your natty box,
It will create a definition.rb file which describes your box.
A preseed (or kickstart or similar file) and a postinstall file

Devops for Drupal, the survey,

Devops is gaining momentum, the idea that developers and operations should work much closer together , the idea that one should automate as much as possible in both their infrastructure and their release process brings along a lot of questions, ideas and tools that need to be integrated in your daily way of working.

Drupal has one of the biggest development communities in the open source world, being part of both communities We are trying to bridge the gap,

Back from opendbcamp and Froscon

I`m back from my second opendbcamp this year, and my first Froscon :)

With Sankt Augustin being only a 2.5 hour drive , it was one of the only conferences in Europe so close to home that I hadn’t visited yet. Overall it’s a good conference, it’s a good sized, not too crowded event which attracted a bunch of interesting speakers.

Sadly they managed to do way to much changes to the schedule last minute which were not updated in their Android app.. so I ended up arriving in the wrong room multiple times .. Also Sadly German conferences still tend to have way to much German language presentations, for foreign speakers from different parts of the world that limits the choice of talks they can visit.

Drupal and Configuration Mgmt, we're getting there ...

For those who haven’t noticed yet .. Im into devops .. Im also a little bit into Drupal, (blame my last name..) , so one of the frustrations I’ve been having with Drupal (an much other software) is the automation of deployment and upgrades of Drupal sites …

So for the past couple of days I’ve been trying to catch up to the ongoing discussion regarding the results of the configuration mgmt sprint , I’ve been looking at it mainly from a systems point of view , being with the use of Puppet/ Chef or similar tools in mind .. I know I`m late to the discussion but hey , some people take holidays in this season :) So below you can read a bunch of my comments … and thoughts on the topic ..

The case for Augeas

Ever since I met David Lutterkort over steaks at OLS 2007 augeas was this tool in the back of my mind that I couldn’t place… I never saw the need for it… or it seemed to be huge overkill for the problem that needed solving .

Till I ran into sipxecs rewriting XML files on the fly .. and putting values in their XML that I could not trace back to an original source. As of Augeas 0.8.x there’s an XML lens out there.

Killing VirtualBox

Note to self :
when virtualbox acts up again .

1. [sdog@stillmine ~]$  VBoxManage list runningvms
2. "vagrant-etherpad_1307533136" {60697a54-35fc-44e7-96b6-008cde6995a6}
3. [sdog@stillmine ~]$ VBoxManage controlvm vagrant-etherpad_1307533136 poweroff
4. 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

Beyond Configuration Mgmt

(This post has been sitting in the drafts folder for way to long, I decided to push the publish button anyhow .. some people might get ideas from it..)

We’ve all run in to the problem, you’ve puppetized, or euh .. cooked , about every part of your infrastructure and then there’s this one service which has no config files, a broken api that doesn’t allow you to configure antyhing, but a magnificent web gui to configure all aspects of the service. Magnificent for the eye , full of AJAX and other fancy stuff which wget isn’t really keen on. Off course before it even starts working you need to set it’s password , from that webgui.

And then vagrant gave up ... for a while

Don’t you just love Ruby errors … like the one below ?

Don’t they almost make Java stack traces look readable ?
57 lines of jibberish … where all I wanted to read was “VirtualBox in error state, check gui”

People like Randall Hanssen deserve much more visibility .. they do understand how to write a good error message and there are lots of projects that need improvement there.

Anywhow… vagrant had suddenly stopped working on me with the error below

The 4158 second catalog run.

Two of my tweets , sorry dents, earlier today caused some people to ask me what on earth I was doing :)

You don’t exist, go away!

Was the first one, indeed .. it was a long time since I had actually seen that one.. this actually happens when you delete the user you are logged in with on a host, when the host notices you don’t exist anymore it will tell you.

Vagrant & Rubylibs

I was testing some MySQL puppet modules on my Vagrant box earlier this week and one of them required augeas.
I kept running into “Could not find a default provider for augeas”, however all the appropriate augeas , augeas-lib and ruby-augeas packages were installed. I inspected the different ruby directories and the files were perfectly in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 where I expected them.

With all the files seemd to be in the right place, my next option was to strace a small ruby script that included augeas, guess what that showed ..