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Bastille: Secure Container Automation at SCaLE18x

I am looking forward to presenting “Bastille: Secure Container Automation” at SCaLE18x. This demonstrates the container automation I’ve layered atop FreeBSD’s mature container system, jails. Bastille is an open-source system for automating deployment and management of containerized applications on FreeBSD. Bastille automates deployment and management of containers using a container technology *old enough to buy you a… Read More »

Running Dell DSET 3.2 on CentOS 6.2

Earlier today I was working with Dell Support to gather information about a broken system. It was suggested that I use their DSET utility to gather data and return a report. The problem is, DSET doesn’t natively support CentOS, so some tweaks were needed in order for it to run properly. In this post I’ll… Read More »

Announcing: Into The Salt Mine

I’ve started a new blog that I’d like to announce called Into the Salt Mine. This blog will focus solely on using the suite of free software applications developed by Salt Stack. This includes configuration management, remote execution, cloud provisioning and more. The goal is to provide regular tips and updates on managing systems using… Read More »

Creating symlinks with Salt States

This morning I finally found a solution to improving vim-usage on my FreeBSD machines. For the longest time I’ve dealt with little annoyances like arrow-keys entering ABCD characters, and backspace only working in certain situations. As it turns out, all I needed was to import a proper vimrc file. As soon as I had tested… Read More »

How to enable ccache with OS X MacPorts

I’ve had a 13″ Macbook for about your years now. When I learned about MacPorts I was really happy to know I could run newer software, and compile things to my liking. These days I run a development environment on my Macbook, all built using MacPorts. This post covers how to leverage ccache in compiling… Read More »

Dell Latitude E5500 Wireless Fedora 14

Dell Latitude E5500 Wireless – Fedora 14 I recently needed to send my main work machine in for repairs so I temporarily used a Dell Latitude E5500 while my normal D630 was away. Boy did I have trouble with the hardware on this machine! This blog post is a meagre attempt at outlining what was… Read More »

Freenode IRC over SSL in Irssi – FreeBSD

I’ve been reconfiguring my Irssi installation this morning and wanted to document the steps I took. I use irssi on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. Required Certificates In order to connect securely over SSL to freenode you need to ensure you have the certificate installed. On FreeBSD, this port is ca_root_nss. portmaster security/ca_root_nss Configure the Network and Server… Read More »

Configure Lighttpd for gitweb on FreeBSD

I spent some time this afternoon setting up a public git repository for my project, Origami. I had a little bit of trouble getting the repository set up initially, particularly the cgi aspect of it all. Below outlines the steps I took to configure Lighttpd for gitweb, hosted on FreeBSD. Installation First, of course, I… Read More »

Arch Linux 2010.05 Installer Issue [FIXED]

I reinstalled my Dell Latitude D630 this afternoon using the new Arch Linux installer (2010.05) netinstall. I had an issue however where the live image would start to boot and then I’d get a blank screen. I quickly realized what the problem was, and found a fix. Note: it looks like it is a similar… Read More »

Configure Serial Console Access on CentOS 5

Today I built some virtual machines on a KVM platform (Ubuntu 10.04 Server as the host). The three virtual machines are CentOS 5, i386 and will be used primarily for internal application testing. One of the requirements for using these machines in a virtual environment was configuring back-end console access from the host. The virtual… Read More »