Why Jesus and Easter Matters

There is a God and He loves you. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Everyone is a sinner and our sin separates us from the love that God wants to express toward us […]

kubernetes health check

The day before thanksgiving, I was pondering an issue I was having. I was pinning a package to a specific version in my Docker container and the repository I grabbed it from stopped offering this specific version. This resulted in a container that Jenkins responded as being built correctly, but missing an integral package that […]

Tupperware announces new container platform

Today, in a surprise move into technology, Tupperware has released a new container platform competing with Docker and rkt. Tupperware’s new platform – named Bowl – has been in alpha for the past 6 months, but now has achieved public beta status. An early photograph of a Tupperware party. This announcement was made at a […]

Captive Portal Restaurant Menu

I have been contacted several times in regards to my captive portal post. In India there seems to be a surge in popularity for restaurants to have an open WiFi that prompts a user to open up a menu/splash page. The caveat being the legal issues encountered when providing free, open wireless internet. In order […]

I do not use the kuerig – here is why…

The kuerig device is a visually pleasing design. It appears to belong in the modern kitchen. A few months ago, I was given a kuerig first generation with a reusable filter and used it as my primary coffee consumption device. It gave me a sense of faster coffee delivery in the morning – I was […]

Debugging PHP web applications

In 2017, this topic seems a little dated and will probably not get me an opportunity to speak at a conference. While all of the elite programmers, cool kids, and CS grads are talking languages such as Go and Erlang – how to do tracing, performance testing, and the like – it seems very juvenile […]

Docker is not a source to blame

I have been reading a few articles that have been published recently regarding the use of docker in production. Of the articles I read, all seem to complain about the instability of docker, the docker ecosystem, and they lament persistent storage. While I have not run docker in production for a lengthy amount of time, […]

Using Puppet to host a private RPM repository

A repository is a place where files are stored, indexed, and available through a package manager to anyone who has the repository information. With rpm based systems, a repository is created with a tool called createrepo. Most of the time, publicly available repositories already offer the packages your server needs. When you have a custom […]

Website protection

There are several factors that go into securing a web application. Most are second nature to seasoned system administrators, but it is still too common to talk to someone who does not know how to properly secure a web application. Here is the common checklist I go through when I determine if a website is […]

GlusterFS overview

GlusterFS is a distributed file system. Think of it as a replacement of traditional file storage (a single NFS/samba server), an alternative to Microsoft’s DFS, or a modern implementation of SAN. It really shines when you have multiple locations and need a file server which must have the same data and be continually in sync. […]

Repercussions from a 1.1 Tbsp DDoS

In case you missed it, the largest recorded Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) occurred. While under DDoS, a victim’s server (or servers) is under high load and cannot complete all requests that are requested by it. Basically, a DDoS victim is someone the attacker wants silenced on the internet. In order to send a DDoS of […]

First puppet module published

I completed my first public module for puppet and submitted it to the puppet forge. It seems too simple to compile into a build and submit it to the forge; however, I made it public for these reasons: I needed experience with puppet code testing. This helped me at the most basic level. I felt […]

Signs you are doing IT wrong

You still use FTP You use SFTP You have a single server hosting 1 website, MySQL, and PHP. It has 4+ GB of RAM and you only have ~2,000 visitors a day. You login via root You don’t use version control You use a control panel for servers which you have SSH access. It takes […]

Iced coffee is the best

I am not a very big fan of hot drinks, but I enjoy drinking a cup/glass/thermos/pot/gallon of coffee. I especially drink it more when my taste buds dance around and say, “Wow! That was some good, quality coffee!” A few weeks ago I set out to find a better way to make my favorite drink […]

Provisioning VMs with cloud init

One of the easiest ways to deploy a virtual machine in oVirt is first to install the OS then turn it into a template. This will allow you to copy that template to deploy new instances. One mundane task after a new template is copied to a new instance is logging in, changing the IP, […]