A long time ago I was active in the local scouting group. To earn some money to keep our group in a healthy financial position we organized a so called vedettweekend. It's an event where people can have a beer, vedett obviously spin a dance, enjoy a spaghetti and have a good chat with your friends.

I always played with the idea of creating a social media wall on one of the projectors we rented for the event. But I never found/made time for it, until today.. My youngest brother is who's interests are overlapping with mine brought up …

We at Inuits are using vagrant for a lot of use cases, neither you are a developer or a sysadmin you for sure will walk into it. Me, myself I do use it merely to automate the many different use cases asked by various projects. It took some time to get myself organized with this pretty nifty piece of software.

In the beginning I used it with the default virtualization provider virtualbox later on I switched to lxc containers instead. By using those containers I already gained on performance. Spinning up and down new containers to test if an application …

at one of my projects I was been asked to set up a private cloud for a validation platform. The whole idea behind this proof of concept is based on the flexibility to spin up and down certain instances providing some specific functionality so tests banks can be ran against them.

As soon as the tests are finished the machines could be terminated. Those instances should be configured using some configuration management software, like puppet. That way the instances are rebuildable and could be treated as cattle.

On the other hand, it takes about 20 minutes to build up an …

I decided to bootstrap my new machine with btrfs as filesystem instead of ext4 LVM volumes. By following the excellent arch-wiki btrfs page I successfully crafted a base system with sub volumes, limited on size and snapshots enabled.

Everything went fine, installed all the other stuff I needed, pulled in my data and was ready to go.

Obviously on that very moment disaster happened.. Due to an unexpected interrupt the journal went corrupt. When trying to boot I got stuck right after decrypted the disk failing to mount my btrfs root volume.

Uncool, unpleasant, .. I almost got insane..

So back …

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 …

I do use puppet as our main configuration management tool. Together with puppetdb all our services are automatically configured from bottom to top.

And it rocks, getting automated as much as possible it is like easy as hell to get a server up and running. The only feature it lacked in my opinion is orchestration. I do know about collective which is made for this purpose.

Only it's yet again using an agent which fails from time to time and eating resources which can be avoided. It's the same reason I don't use the puppet agent daemon but trigger puppet …

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 …