Rewriting an Email’s Sender Address w/Postfix
At Virtual Instruments we rely upon emails from cron to get output from periodic tasks within our infrastructure. These emails will come from the user account and the machine from whence they ran....
View ArticlePrivate Docker Registry w/Nginx Proxy for Stats Collection
In using Docker at Virtual Instruments, we had to setup an internal Docker Registry in order to share our custom Docker images. Setting up a basic internal Docker Registry is trivially easy, but there...
View ArticleBuilding a Better Dashboard for Virtual Infrastructure
TL; DR We built a pretty sweet dashboard for our R&D infrastructure using Graphite, Grafana, collectd, and a home-made VMware VIM API data collector script. Background – Tracking Build Times The...
View ArticleA Local Caching Proxy for “pypi.python.org” via Docker
TL; DR If your infrastructure automation installs packages from PyPI (the Python Package Index) via “pip” or similar tools, you can save yourself from annoying “pypi.python.org timeout” errors by...
View ArticleDocker + Jenkins: Dynamically Provisioning SLES 11 Build Containers
TL; DR Using Jenkins‘ Docker Plugin, we can dynamically spin-up SLES 11 build slaves on-demand to run our builds. One of the hurdles to getting there was to create a SLES 11 Docker base-image, since...
View ArticleBuilding Vagrant Boxes with Nested VMs using Packer
In “Improving Developer Productivity with Vagrant” I discussed the productivity benefits gained from using Vagrant in our software development tool chain. Here are some more details about the mechanics...
View ArticleTesting Puppet Code with Vagrant
At Virtual Instruments we use Vagrant boxes to locally test our Puppet changes before pushing those changes into production. Here are some details about how we do this. Puppet Support in Vagrant...
View ArticleAnsible vs Puppet – An Overview of the Solutions
This is part 1/2 in a series. For part #2 see: Ansible vs Puppet – Hands-On with Ansible. Having recently joined Delphix in a DevOps role, I was tasked with increasing the use of a configuration...
View ArticleAnsible vs Puppet – Hands-On with Ansible
This is part 2/2 in a series. For part #1 see: Ansible vs Puppet – An Overview of the Solutions. Notes & Findings From Going Hands-On with Ansible After playing with Ansible for a week to...
View ArticleTesting Ansible Roles with Test Kitchen
Recently while attending DevOps Days Austin 2015, I participated in a breakout session focused on how to test code for configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible. Having started to...
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