As I already wrote about in the past I have a raspberry pi running at home. I do also have a VPS running somewhere on the interweb for an owncloud instance.

Being a sysadmin I wanted to know when my home devices become unreachable and when the owncloud instance is down. By mail in the first place if possible by sms message for free in the ideal world.

And guess what, I managed to reach the ideal world to monitor my instances. Over here I'll describe how I managed to do so.

msmtp

First of all you need to install …

In this article I'll try to describe how I use vagrant in my daily tasks as an operations dude as well as I deployed it at one of our customers to help the developers focusing on the coding part rather than the operations part.

Vagrant

Since the beginning of my career at inuits I'm using vagrant almost everyday. If I got payed every time I spin up a box I could have bought that tesla already some years ago! But unfortunately I'm not :)

For almost 99% of the use cases I use this nifty tool it's related to puppet. Writing …

As an enthusiastic open-source addict I use github on a regularly base to share my knowledge with the world, to explore new software tools, to enhance software with new features, to fix bugs, to collaborate with others, and above all to live the open source way!

But I also have to admit that their are some disadvantages too, from time to time the availability, well lacks availability.., you have to pay for private repositories used for testing purposes and github enterprise can't be used publically anymore..

Self-hosted git

Using your own git instance makes your software less accessible, since like …

To make the process of connecting to our local wifi at home a bit less complex I decided to create a qr code for it. That way people can easily use their camera of their smartphone to connect to our network without typing in the WPA key.

So I looked on the net for a qr generator and started by typing in our SSID, when realizing it can't be secure to fill in our wpa key too.. It may be a bit paranoia but well I don't trust anything on the interweb most of the time.

Doing some further research …

Some weeks ago I removed some files on my system I wish I didn't cause I still needed them.

Since I use some encrypted containers in dropbox I figured I could recover them from this nifty service. But in the logs of dropbox those files are obviously also encrypted. So that was a no go.

Therefore I started looking for backup solutions. The first one I tried was backintime, very easy to use, clean GUI interface but failed multiple times in restoring some files.

Looking for a more decent piece of software I found rsnapshot

And hell I like it …

Since I discovered the joy of linux servers over desktop distributions a few years ago I revived an old portable and promoted him to be my home server.

Connected him our router in the little storage room on a top shelf gathering dust I could test, configure, break (and pass sleep) a huge variety of open-source software.

Many of those adventures I also used to provide my blog with content. After a while I figured this setup isn't really needed to be powered on 24h a day 7 days a week. So I bought myself a raspberry pi which would …

At our office we have an ultimaker 2 installed, we have it now for some weeks and already printed out a bunch of stuff. It's cool to see, amazed by the technology.

Expect the manner to start a print job, you have to save your generated gcode files onto an SD card, stick it into the ultimaker and use the rather simple menu from the tiny display to start the print job.

The time of a print job is rather long depending on the object you want to print, so many times you got up and went seeing if everything …

Nowadays it becomes more and more relevant knowing which version of a package is installed and having an overview of the packages infected by some bugs or security holes. That way you could see which servers are possibly vulnerable for those on the dark side.

That's where pakiti comes in a clean web based overview of your servers listing all packages vulnerable against the CVE in particular.

It's a client server setup where the client reports the version of the packages to the pakiti server. The server on his turn checks those versions against CVE to see if there are …

To make our and other lives less painful writing documentation is a good start to decrease the level of frustration when working on a shared project.

It's a common feeling writing documentation isn't something we are all waiting for to do. In an effort to make it easier for all of us an automatically way of deployment can be managed by our good friend jenkins in combination with docker.

The details about this flow is been described on this page. After reading through this documentation section you should be aware of the general deployment idea so you can implement it …

For some of my development projects I'm using git repositories because of the flexibility of it. But the initial beta phase I don't want to keep private until I created something working. Normally I use github.com repositories for them, a good service except you have to pay for private repositories.

So I searched the internet for private alternatives and installed gitlab on my CentOS 6 machine. It worked fine, but it was a bit of an overkill to manage about 10 repositories for only one user, myself. So I decided to migrate it back to the essence.

The essence …