Russell Ballestrini

The companion webwords git repo lives here.

I'm running a beta for Remarkbox and here is my biggest take away: Always collect information from potential customers as soon as possible.

Nearly 6 years ago I launched the beta for LinkPeek, a web page screenshot service.

This post continues from where we left off on the Minikube guide.

Minikube allows you to run a self contained, single node, Kubernetes cluster on your workstation.

I found this technique after stumbling on Aaron Parecki's blog.

A web page does not need to look the same on every browser or device.

This blog post assumes you already have: a Jenkins master and none or many build servers FPM installed on the build servers Node.js installed on the build servers I add jenkins-build.sh in the root of the Node.js code repo: # example usage: JOB_NAME=examp…

The Pyramid web application framework uses a request object to hold state regarding an inbound HTTP connection.

Do you have a Pyramid application which authenticates users and uses a signed cookie as a session?

At work we mostly run Centos and I have some NodeJS services to deploy.

This took me about 2 hours to figure out, hopefully it saves you time.

After dinner tonight, Carter, my four year old asked me, "If I swallow lots of air will I be lighter?".

At work today I needed an easy way to collect private IP addresses of every instance in one of our production VPCs.

I desire the following options in /etc/resolv.conf: rotate timeout:1 attempts:1 Ubuntu or Debian For Ubuntu or Debian based systems, place the options in /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base: rotate timeout:1 attempts:1 These options merge with the options

I have a single DNS server running on a KVM at DigitalOcean for $5/mo.

Its finally happening.

While developing Botoform I ran into an issue with Boto3 where I couldn't easily get the "main" route table of a VPC.

Here we define a function called pkgs.

This post will be updated frequently when as I learn more about how to filter AWS resources using Boto3 library.

I ran into a bug in botocore and this post will serve to document a work around as well as show how to use botocore session object to work with the values stored in ~/.aws/config.

The original purpose of this post was to recognize the teachers and mentors which have helped shape me.

Today I needed to change the default gateway on every Zone and KVM guest on my SmartOS hypervisor because I switched my ISP and as a result my gateway changed from 192.168.1.254 to 192.168.1.1.

Turns out I don't have IPv6 setup properly in my network so when apt attempts to connect to the Internet it tries IPv6 and fails.

This post describes how to write a polyglot -- in this case a script which runs as valid Bash or Python, to search for available Python interpreters.

The following tutorial documents how to migrate a libvirt/KVM guest from Ubuntu to SmartOS. akuma: Ubuntu Hypervisor guy: SmartOS Hypervisor sagat: guest to migrate These commands were run on akuma: WORKDIR=/KVMROOT/migrate sudo mkdir $WORKDIR cd $WORKDIR

At work I'm looking into the possibility of porting parts of our AWS automation codebase from Boto2 to Boto3.

Do you want a secure setup for publishing and staging build artifacts from a Jenkins build server to a Salt Master?

Connect to zone and determine the auto generated password for postgres user: cat /var/svc/log/system-zoneinit\:default.log | grep PGSQL_PW document the result and log into postgres with the following command, entering the password when prompted: [root@ps…

The operations of a company will have intrinsic risk.

So autofs randomly stopped working on one of my Ubuntu hosts (this issue has been found on Arch as well so its most likely a change upstream).

Today I built a GUI and workflow around Ansible using Rundeck.

This weekend I finished my first sprint on s3p which is a Python library and CLI application that manages release pipelines on AWS S3.

So I'm working with an API (AWS ElastiCache) that offers mandatory pagination of results.

I'm currently refactoring a script that tags AWS resources and I came up with this one liner to generate pretty output.

First, I installed the mongodb 14.2.0 (uuid a5775e36-2a02-11e4-942a-67ae7a242985) dataset: imgadm avail | grep mongo imgadm import a5775e36-2a02-11e4-942a-67ae7a242985 Next, I launched a new zone with this image.

I used project-fifo to launch the percona (14.2.0) MySQL dataset.

This article expands on my “Hello World” for Heka blog post.

I wrote these Salt States to install Mailpile on an Ubuntu host.

This post analyses the FreeNAS 9 code base and discusses the various places users may feel confident to hack on.

Mixed content errors occur because Nginx (the front-end server) communicates to the upstream WSGI server using http.

Lots of people claim that you need to upgrade openssl package, but this will not fix the issue.

I extended my IRC Bot Foxbot today to allow it to run canned remote executions on behalf of users in an IRC channel.

Sometimes you only want to see what has changed, and that is OK.

Note: I will update this post as I progress.

When operations first became a thing, system administrators stood up servers using a base image from their favourite distribution.

I maintain many tools for creating automatic backups for various systems.

tar-back is a backup utility to tar and gzip target filesystems.