Blogs

Ansible Playbook to Prepare for OpenShift Enterprise 3.1

December 12, 2015

This playbook is written for RHEL 7.2 and OSE v3.1. It will perform the following steps which should take place before running the openshift-ansible byo playbook. Install prerequisite RPMs like docker, python, etc. Persist the systemd journal for easier debugging Setup docker ephemeral storage on 2nd disk Turn off swap Enable use of NFS in selinux Prerequisites See my Testing OpenShift Enterprise V3 post for the prereqs. The Playbook The lastest version is available here.

Ansible CMDB Inventory and Facts Reporting

December 6, 2015

You just deployed a complex multi-host app using Ansible. Wouldn’t it be helpful to see a overview of the deployment including hardware details? I just found ansible-cmdb which combines info from the Ansible inventory and discovered facts to create a detailed HTML report akin to a Configuration Management Database. To use it in your playbook dir, just create a directory to hold facts discovered by the setup module then generate the report.

Notes on SNMP MIBs OIDs and Grey Whiskers

September 8, 2015

With as many grey whiskers as I have, you would think I could grok SNMP in my sleep by now. Unfortunately, everytime I have to deal with it I get frustrated, wonder where the hell my notes from last time are, and start cursing. From now on, here are my notes! I’m typically using Zabbix to poll SNMP OIDs and place the MIBs on the Zabbix server or the Zabbix proxy responsible for SNMP in /usr/share/snmp/mibs.

Testing OpenShift Enterprise V3

July 28, 2015

So much for testing OpenShift Origin with Vagrant on OS X, because it does not work yet. Let’s evaluate OpenShift Enterprise v3 on RHEL! First go get yourself an eval license. The OpenShift VMs will run RHEL7.1 and ride on top of RHEV. Documentation First off, here are some starting points to get oriented and acquainted with OpenShift. Docs Getting Started Docs Overview Training Download Prerequisites OpenShift Enterprise 3 Architecture Guide - planning, deployment and operation of an Open Source Platform as a Service Load Balancing Videos

Testing Openshift Origin V3 with Ansible and Vagrant on OS X

June 28, 2015

The OpenShift Origin project provides Ansible playbooks and roles for installing OpenShift on various infratructure. I’m going to try out the example using Vagrant and VirtualBox on my Mac. I’m not very familiar with Vagrant or OpenShift v3 yet, so I’m just going to think out loud and see how it goes. I’ve also recently started testing OpenShift Enterprise. Some Background OpenShift Origin is an opensource PaaS (platform as a service).

How To Scale Up Ansible Playbooks and Roles in a Managable Way

May 16, 2015

Ansible is Awesome! Ansible is a Mess! So you found Ansible, and you were all Woah! Ansible is awesome! Ansibilize all the things! Then you created a git repo and started hacking. Playbooks look in the current directory to find roles, libraries, and inventories, so naturally you put everything in one big git repo, right? You tried to follow the best practices for writing playbooks, you created roles, and maybe you wrote a filter plugin or a custom module for configuring an application unique to your environment.

Resources for Learning About Docker

April 19, 2015

Tutorials Docker’s 10min Tutorial Andrew Baker’s Introduction to Docker Red Hat Workhops Docker and Kubernetes Training - Christian Posta Blog Intro Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Books As of April 2015, O’Reilly has at least 3 books on Docker pending publication. The first two are available in pre-release form now. Using Docker My exercises from the book: identidock Docker Cookbook Docker: Up and Running Blogs Docker Blog Docker Weekly Newsletter Rancher Blog posts some great overviews like this one and this one on monitoring ClusterHQ Blog from makers of Flocker container live migration Videos O’Reilly Introduction to Docker

Split an Ansible Git Repo and Retain the Commit History

March 15, 2015

Starting with a jumbled git repo of various Ansible roles, playbooks, inventories, group_vars, etc. I want to create a new repo out of a selection of the subdirectories and retain the commit history. I have an ansible-test repo with a tree that looks roughly like this: . ├── adhoc/ │ ├── rolling-reboot.yml │ └── scripts/ ├── README.md └── runtime/ ├── roles/ │ ├── foo-role/ │ └── zimbra/ │ ├── ansible.cfg │ ├── hosts │ ├── tasks/ │ └── .

Zimbra Exchange Web Services Crashes OS X Mail.app

February 17, 2015

Zimbra added EWS support in ZCS 8.5. Right around that time OS X 10.10 was released. Cool! Let’s start syncing all our things to our brand new Mail.app, Calendar.app, and Contacts.app over HTTPS! Strangely, this page says that: ZCS 8.5 targeted EWS support ONLY with Outlook for Mac’s. There was no testing or expectation that the native mac apps would work with the EWS configuration type. Really?! I hope that’s not true.

Tuning ext4 Creation and Mount Options for Zimbra

February 2, 2015

Zimbra is a email collaboration suite. Its various compontents perform MTA duties, message store, full text indexing. In a large environment, the number of files and I/O operations can really add up. How we ensure the filesystem is ready to support it? Zimbra’s Recommendations Zimbra offers some guidance for tuning the filesystem, with tips like: Mount file systems with the noatime option. It generally is not important to know the last access time of all the files, so the extra write ops are wasteful.