Ubiquiti Wireless APs
I'm no network-specialist, so I don't generally get to play about with much 'pro' network gear (whilst I've fiddled about with some Cisco gear in the past, it's always been small-scale stuff). I've had a bit of a chance to put some Ubiquiti access points through their paces on a…
Posted17 October 2017 : Read More
Migating DNS From Rackspace to Google
One of my clients is moving out of Rackspace and into Google (for a variety of reasons, not least cost and service). Part of this work requires moving some hosted DNS domains. I asked Rackspace to export the domains, and they pointed me at a service called Pitchfork, which is essentially…
Posted17 October 2017 : Read More
My Doorbell has an IP Address
My doorbell has an IP address. I know it's been done before, but I did it because: I can ;-) I have a hard time hearing the doorbell in the garden Almost all the tech I needed is easily available I've hooked up our original-to-the-house, brass and bakerlite doorbell button to a Yahoo yodel…
Posted15 November 2016 : Read More
Ansible Connected CheckMK
CheckMK is one of many monitoring systems around (I've talked about it a bit before). It's roots are in Nagios, which was once pretty much the defacto solution we all used. CheckMK has a lot of it's own eccentricities, and the UI is a long way from perfect. However, it's…
Posted12 July 2016 : Read More
MySQL and MariaDB
Phewy, where has the time gone? It's February already! One of my clients is a fairly extensive MySQL user. They're mostly on Centos 6, and so are using some pretty old versions of MySQL. There was a requirement to replicate all that data off-site (and then back it up, send it…
Posted10 February 2016 : Read More
Check MK
I've used Check MK quite a bit at my previous employer, and I've used Nagios (from which it evolved) plenty over several years until then. When the subject of monitoring came up at work, it seemed like an obvious choice. It's got the usual esoterics you'd expect (!), but for…
Posted2 October 2015 : Read More
Ansible
I'm rather enjoying Ansible. I just created a Centos 7 VM and got Ansible installed and talking to the other machines in our estate in (literally) a matter of minutes (if you can make SSH work, you're pretty much all set). Getting it to do some clever stuff like dropping…
Posted2 October 2015 : Read More
Jenkins Pipelines
One of the cornerstones of my employer's (infrastructure) deployment systems is a Jenkins box performing 'pipeline' delivery. It uses a bunch of Jenkins plugins to provide the UI and job-interconnections required to make pipelines possible. We then use a separate pipeline for every Puppet module we write, another for (nearly)…
Posted23 July 2015 : Read More
Mcollective
I recently had a bit of an Mcollective problem to look at. It turned out to be very simple to fix, but finding it was pretty gnarly. For the uninitiated, Mcollective is a server daemon that uses ActiveMQ (or other messaging technologies) to communicate with client daemons across an estate of…
Posted13 July 2015 : Read More
Redis
I've been playing around with Redis lately. We use Redis as a 'stash' of data from Puppet and Mcollective (one, independent master on each Puppet master). The data is refreshed pretty regularly, so data security isn't much of a concern, and all the clients put their data into all the…
Posted23 April 2015 : Read More