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So hiera wasn’t working when used through my puppetmaster.

As you might already know, I like pushing the boundaries of what puppet is able to do.

This could be a post detailing how to host clustered virtual machines with rgmanager and clusvcadm, but that is a longer story and there is much work to do.

Rgmanager, clustat and clusvcadm are useful tools in cluster land.

After hacking around with a few firefox internals the other day, I decided there was another little annoyance that I had… When I’m acting insane and using my mouse to open and close tabs, the per tab close button disappears when there is only one tab left!

Firefox has a “new tab” speed dial type page available.

Hello planet puppet readers!

I’m working on some fancy puppet “code”, and I realized recursion could be very useful.

All good sysadmins know about using tail -f to follow a log file.

I’ve tried to push puppet to its limits, and so far I’ve succeeded.

I am writing a keepalived module for puppet.

I love my keyboard shortcuts, and I sometimes I want to change them.

Dear internets, I’m a sysadmin/architect, which means I spend a good amount of time coding in puppet and other languages.

I always find myself reading about fusion.

It turns out it is non trivial (afaict) to include a tree of files (a directory) in a python distutils data_files argument.

Good python software developers tend to use distutils and include a setup.py with their code.

I’ve been working on a puppet module for gluster.

The thoughtful bodepd has been kind enough to help me get my puppet-gluster module off the ground and publicized a bit too.

I am an avid cobbler+puppet user.

Many thanks to johnmark in #gluster for syndicating my “gluster” tagged blog posts on http://www.gluster.org/blog/ I aim to keep these posts technical and informative, aimed mostly at other sysadmins and gluster users.

I’ve been having some strange networking issues with gluster.

For the last ~two or so years I’ve played and tested gluster on and off and hanging out in the awesome #gluster channel on Libera.chat.

So a friend of mine uses kde4 for its klipper feature.

I’ve been reluctantly dreading the switch to gnome 3 + shell until it’s been ironed out a little bit more than gnome 3.0 - finally took the plunge. overall it’s working well. here are some (hopefully) useful notes: preupgrade 14->17 in one step doesn't wo…

The nostalgia of serial console servers, kvm’s and switched PDU’s is hopefully no longer visible in your server room.

So you’ve learned screen, ssh and vim.

Dear internets, During my daily grind of computer architecturing, I often learn something new that I wish a mentor had taught me earlier.

Dear internets, Once upon a time, I had one of those “brain teaser-of-the-day” calendars.

In case it wasn’t already obvious, I am a huge fan of git, and often prefer it over sliced bread.

I use gnome-do.

I was recently asked to give a lecture for the PRELUDE series at McGill.

Makefiles are both scary and wonderful.

i use gnu/linux. it’s probably no secret. what is more of a secret, is that i secretly (well actually not so secretly) love using gedit for editing text. i still use vim, echo (gnu bash) and emacs (but only for org-mode). vim is really, really great. but…

i decided i’d compile a short list of features / functionality which should be added to the new nokia N900 to make it totally pro. it’s pretty good as it is, despite it not working with the bell networks. i’ve attempted to order this list in order of impo…

since i do much research on the internets, i often find myself in a web browser. my favourite of the lot is epiphany. this post isn’t about its merits or failures, but about the awesome way to make my location bar be exactly how i like it: monospaced. just

Sometimes the interfaces you need just aren’t well documented, but thanks to the internets, some websearches, and a useful dictionary, you can often decipher random web documentation jargon to help you produce useful code.

sooner or later you’ll end up needing to do some argument parsing. the foolish end up writing their own yucky parser that ends up having a big if statement filled with things like: if len(sys.argv) > 1 in it. don’t do this unless you have a really good ex…

if i’ve been silent as of late, it’s because i’ve been furiously coding away. i’ve got what i think are some elegant implementations cooking, and with any luck my extra work will pay off in hours and days and months of time saved down the road. i’ve got a…

not that what i’m about to tell you is brilliant, new or revolutionary, however i thought i’d mention it in case you’re not doing it. also feel free to let me know if there is a better way. problem: i have some stdout which comes from a command and i want…

i’m sure that most (if not all) of the technically inclined readers know about this already, but since it’s such a well written article (and detailed in the right places), i felt i should bump up it’s link count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix…

lvs load balancing always felt like an elusive task. here i will document how to get it working with the excellent shorewall firewall, as an extension to their two interface common use case. this was all necessary for a group of grad students that needed…

while doing a little reading and research, i ended up reading a bit of the hdparm man page. never in my life have i read such a scary man page. i guess it is appropriate for halloween, but it came 2 days late in my case. as a result of my being so impress…

at work i use two screens for my day to day workflow. i find it’s much more efficient for doing work, like coding. i’ll often have at least one terminal open, a full screen text editor, and usually a number of references, such as the dbus specification op…

so my boss was recently kind enough to purchase a new keyboard and mouse combo to attempt to relieve the elbow-and-down pain that i endure due to constant programming and mouse moving. thanks. i received my “logitech cordless desktop wave pro” today, and…

after a recent upgrade to ubuntu 9.04, it seems that i’ve been pushed into using some “unfeatures” that i didn’t ask for. well apparently they won’t be unfeatures forever, but for me, notify-osd and indicator-applet aren’t quite ready for my consumption. i

after a brief bout of stupidity i quickly realized that my makefile had gone awry and was quickly eating through my filesystem. after ^C killing it, it seems i only took out most of /lib/* and /usr/sbin/* – who needs those anyways… apparently almost every…

i’m sure that i won’t be able to tell you anything revolutionary which can’t be found out by reading the manual, but i thought i would clarify it, and by showing you a specific example which i needed. subprocess.Popen accepts a bunch or args, one of which…

as part of a different project, i needed to duplicate some existing terminal magic in python. what i needed to write was something similar to the getch() function in curses. it can be found in: ncurses*/base/lib_getch.c after doing an: apt-get source libn…

i’m sure everyone who has used ssh has experienced this, but couldn’t put their finger on what was happening exactly. this article explains.

turns out the cheetah python templating engine (2.0 since year 2006) is quite reminiscent of fortran (since the 1950’s) in their use of the #slurp directive (cheetah) and the $ string. either one, when appended to the end of a string, remove the implicit…