Not a big blog, but a quick problem I got solved on IRC that I thought might help others. I have a Gateway LT4009u with an Atom N2600. It’s my “hacker/workshop” laptop. The atom N processors are a bit gimpy so sometimes things don’t run right. One thing is GNURadio on Pentoo. Pentoo runs hardened and this pisses off the Atom N. ...

I, like many sysadmins, really want to monitor all the things I actually care about. Monitoring is in general hard. Not because it’s hard to set up, but it’s hard to get right. It’s really easy to monitor ALL THE THINGS and then just end up with pager fatigue. It’s all about figuring out what you need to know and when you need to know it. So in This case I Really Need to Know that My Machines Are Staying in compliance with Chef There was a few ways you can do this. The first thought I had was adding a hook into all of my runs and having them report in on failure. This is mostly because I’m always looking for another way to hack on Chef and work on my ruby. The big problem with this is: ...

It’s been about a year since my last post, mostly frustrated with Chef as a beginner. Now I spend most of my day writing cookbooks and recipes. In fact I am even helping the Lead Dev at work learn Chef and got back from Chef conference. There I met a lot of amazing people and even offered to help maintain BSD support in chef. This post isn’t about that so much. It’s mostly about a behavior I noticed I picked up. When I worked for Stephens Media I spent a lot of my energy trying to contribute, in posts, open source, pull requests, ect. Then when I moved to Slickdeals.net my time was really sucked up. I drifted from working on Pelican and stopped doing as many pull requests. At some time I set up a personally hosted Stash instance. Then I locked that stash instance off behind a login. Then I started writing in my private confluence instead of here. Now all my projects these days are All Rights I noticed… hmph. ...

I’ve spent the last week working on implementing chef. The experience is frustrating to say the least. Instead of whining I wanted to take the time to write out some of my pain points and hopefully offer some constructive fixes to what I see as the wall in the learning curve. Now to be clear up front. Most of my problems aren’t with Chef, Ruby, or most of the core product; it’s with implementing it. To be more precise I think the failure REALLY is documentation. ...

Actually I should have called this where have I been. This seemed catchier though. In short the answer is I have been at my new job at SlickDeals They have keep me as busy as can be. Because of this major shift I changed a lot of habits; I stopped writing here as much, I stopped actively contributing to Pelican,1 and I also stopped posting to github. Be not too afraid. I still write plenty of code and fiddle around with everything. I just stopped posting most of it to github. I mostly use my own private stash instance. There is some publicly accessible code for those who are interested. The reason is that stash is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper for my private repos so I just put most of my stuff there. I have been rethinking that lately since I miss a lot of the github community style. ...

It’s time for my monthly or so post! I wanted to go through and post about my OpenBSD firewall I built but that’s not 100%. Also I’m not ready to go on about anything amazing with puppet because without my lab being done puppet isn’t useful so lets go back to talking about my dev environment! I know Justin has been asking for this for a little while. Preface: Going “back” to Vim As a sysadmin at work I use vi a lot. Not even vim; vi. We have lots of unix boxes that default to vi as the installed editor and we don’t just go installing vim on everything. Personally I use vim a good amount on my machine since I spend a lot of command line time anyways. I know more than just a few of the commands but I really only consider myself a second or maybe third year vim user1 since I never used it full time to write code. I live the motion and use things like ci[ and C-v 5j x but I still fail to use multiple registers, buffers, or tabs… or even the leader commands. ...