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2014 HPCwire Awards
The StratoStor project I’ve been working on for the past 10 months just got a “Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch” award from HPCwire announced at this week’s SuperComputing 2014 (SC14)...
View ArticleGet Ansible’s “pip” method to install the right version of Django
I was using Ansible to set up a bunch of Scientific Linux 6.6 servers running Django and I wanted to use a specific version of Django, version 1.6.5, on all servers. Ansible makes this easy with the...
View ArticleClick to stream .m3u files in Ubuntu
I just recently heard about CCMixter.org on FLOSS Weekly. CCMixter.org is a resource and collaborative space for musicians and remixers. They have thousands of music tracks which can be downloaded,...
View ArticleStop mounting ISO files in Linux with “-t iso9660”
Google “How do I mount an ISO image in Linux” and most of the links still say to use “-t iso9660”. For example: mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro diskimage.iso /mnt/iso That worked fine 10 years ago, but...
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Peerio promises privacy for everyone
A new company called Peerio is promising secure, easy messaging and file sharing for everyone. They’re building apps that encrypt everything you send or share, making the code for these apps open...
View ArticleRestarting network interfaces in Ansible
I’m using Ansible to set up the network interface cards of multiple racks of storage servers running Centos 6.6. Each server has four network interfaces to configure, a public 1GbE interface, a private...
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Use Web of Trust (WOT) to thwart scammy web sites
My friend Shannon Phillips recently updated her Facebook status with: Word to travelers: do not book hotel rooms through TripAdvisor. They will funnel you through sketchy third-party sites (“Amoma” is...
View ArticleWhy adding a .conf or .cfg file to /etc/sudoers.d doesn’t work
I needed to add some sudo access rights for support personnel on about a hundred Centos 6.6 servers. Currently no one one these hosts had sudo rights, so the /etc/sudoers file was the default file. I’m...
View ArticleAdding a LUKS-encrypted iSCSI volume to Synology DS414 NAS and Ubuntu 15.04
I have an Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid” workstation already set up with LUKS full disk encryption, and I have a Synology DS414 NAS with 12TB raw storage on my home network. I wanted to add a disk volume on the...
View ArticlePolicy-based Cloud Storage
This is a talk I gave last week at the SF Microservices Meetup titled Policy-based Cloud Storage, Persisting Data in a Multi-Site, Multi-Cloud World. In it I cover Apcera‘s approach to storage for...
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5 User Engagement Problems Twitter Should Fix this Week
Twitter’s mobile app needs help. Of all of the social networks, engagement on Twitter is dismally low. Even the people who like the app don’t spend nearly as much time on Twitter as they do on other...
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Quickly get IP addresses of new VMs
I spin up a lot of VMs using VMware Fusion. I generally keep “clean” generic copies of a few different distros and versions of Linux servers ready to go with my login, an sshd server, ssh keys, and...
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Mounting AWS EFS volumes inside Docker Containers
Amazon announced the development of the Amazon Elastic File System (AWS EFS) in 2015. EFS was designed to provide multiple EC2 instances with shared, low-latency access to a fully-managed file system....
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Running a 6-node CockroachDB cluster with AWS EFS storage
CockroachDB is new distributed database which, like its namesake, is really hard to kill. CockroachDB implements SQL DML commands for creating schemas, tables, and indexes using the same syntax as...
View ArticleTurn off Apple Wallet / Apple Pay notifications and nag screens
The latest version of IOS for iPhone, iPad, and iWatch devices really, really wants you to set up Apple Wallet / Apple Pay. Your devices want you to embed Apple in the middle of every purchase, and...
View ArticleRemoving mount volumes from your desktop in Ubuntu 17.10
I just upgraded from Ubuntu 17.04 to 17.10 and one of the first things I noticed was all of the disk volumes that are mounted under my home directory appeared on my desktop. In Ubuntu 17.10, all...
View ArticleRedirect mail links to GMail on Ubuntu 18.04 using Desktop Webmail
My Ubuntu 18.04 box has Thunderbird installed as the default mail client. I was a Thunderbird user for years, but I currently spend most of my time using GMail, and when I click on a email mailto: link...
View ArticleUse .iso and Kickstart files to automatically create Ubuntu VMs
I was looking for a way to automate the creation of VMs for testing various distributed system / cluster software packages. I’ve used Vagrant in the past but I wanted something that would: Allow me to...
View ArticleHow to get the IP address of a KVM/virsh VM
Since virsh domifaddr doesn’t work to get the IP addresses of VMs on a bridged network, I wrote a get-vm-ip script (which you can download from Github) which uses this to get the IP of a running VM:...
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Setting up a personal, production-quality Kubernetes cluster with Kubespray
I’ve been setting up and tearing down Kubernetes clusters for testing various things for the past year, mostly using Vagrant/Virtualbox but also some VMware vSphere and OpenStack deployments. I wanted...
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