Category: Linux

  • Proxy SQL Services Reporting Server with HAProxy

    A common issue with SQL Server Reporting Services is to proxy the server so it is not exposed on the internet. This is difficult to do with nginx, apache, and others due to NTLM authentication, although nginx offers a paid version that supports NTLM authentication. One easy fix is to use HAProxy and use TCP […]

  • SSH in a for loop is a solution…

    I just read an article by Jay Valentine on LinkedIn where he talks about Puppet and how they were not profitable, and also noted that Chef is not, and has never been, profitable. That got me to thinking, why are IT professionals investing in these technologies (time, knowledge, effort…). As an IT pro, it’s tempting […]

  • Standalone puppet with hiera 5 error…

    With puppet moving more and more away from supporting a standalone model, it’s somewhat difficult to get puppet standalone working. I recently got bit by a hiera update that caused my puppet standalone deployments to stop interacting with hiera the way that I had deployed it. Affected versions: puppet 4.10.10 hiera 3.4.3 The error that […]

  • Puppet deprecation in stdlib module…

    As part of the long upgrade to become fully compatible with puppet 4 and drop puppet 3 support — version 4.13+ of the stdlib module introduced some breaking changes for other modules that I use. I recently upgrade some individual modules using the ‘puppet module upgrade’ method. Upon upgrading, I received the following message: Error: […]

  • Adding git branch and aws profile to your bash prompt…

    As a consultant who works in AWS for numerous clients, one of the most important things to keep track of is which AWS CLI profile am I currently on. To help clarify this, I’ve recently added the AWS profile to my bash prompt to remove all doubt. In addition, I’ve added a prompt for the […]

  • Latest Amazon EC2 AMI Supports Puppet 3.7.4

    Good news! After quite some time without a supported puppet and ruby combination from the EC2 yum repositories, the latest AMI has support for puppet 3.7.4. This will make deploying puppet environments easier and not require use of the gem and the development packages requirement to compile it.

  • Tuning EC2 Network Stack

    I recently had an issue with web requests taking 1.2-1.5 seconds from a service hosted in AWS. I had a small SSD-backed EC2 instance with a small SSD-backed RDS instance running a wordpress site and this type of performance was not acceptable. After a bit of troubleshooting I discovered that the network was suffering from […]

  • puppet search function deprecation

    With the release of puppet 3.7, the search function is now deprecated, and will be removed in 4.0. This is a feature that I had used by recommendation of a puppet cookbook when creating virtual resources and managing users that I have now removed. Using the search function basically added the namespace of an existing […]

  • Redmine Issues with HTML Formatting

    I recently had an issue with a client where we had deployed Redmine with an add-on plugin (CKEditor) that displayed all updates to issues as HTML. This resulted in all new issues and content being created with HTML tags but existing/previous content was not and it looked like a big glob on the page. To […]

  • Puppet node inheritance deprecation

    Puppet 4.0 will deprecate node inheritance which is currently a common way to organize resources. I have been using node inheritance to group common configurations into a basic role and then inherit that with a node declaration like the following: # site.pp … node webserver { # add all generic web server configuration here } […]