It's been a while since I last wrote a blog, but that doesn't mean I've been slacking off. In the next series of blog posts, we'll be looking at some of the new things in Foreman 1.2. But today, I want to make a small diversion...
I recently got some new hardware in the house, courtesy of my employer, so I decided it was time to play with one of the other virtualization technologies out there.
I’ve been managing my virtual machines using Foreman for close to 2 years now, and that’s brought me a huge set of benefits in terms of how I test new code (or changes to existing code), and new packages. That’s just awesome :)
But repeated rebuilds of a machine lead to one small niggling problem. One which bites you on every rebuild. One which doesn’t stop you working, but requires a few extra keypresses after every rebuild, and possibly at every login.
So as many of you know, I use Archlinux on a lot of my hardware - but you’ll have noticed that I always use Debian for my Foreman servers. What gives?
The Problem with Versions Archlinux presents two major problems to Foreman. Firstly, the current version of Puppet in the AUR is 3.0.1. Admitedly, I made that problem for myself, since the AUR PKGBUILD of Puppet is owned by me… However, Arch is all about latest-and-greatest so it’s the right thing to do for Puppet.
So I've been managing the Debian packages for about 8 months now, and every so often I get asked if there's anything people can do to help. I have to answer "Not really" because the way we're building the Debian packages is somewhat arcane.
At least, it was. This blog is to tell you all about how it's now much more open.
Packaging in the openThe first piece of the puzzle starts with our foreman-rpms repo (github.
This blog post has been in my to-write pile for nearly 4 months now. I have two laptops at home, both of which are capable of running a few virtual machines. If you missed the news, I now work on Foreman full time, so obviously I want to use Foreman to manage my virtual machines. So it seems like the perfect opportunity to give you a blog post about getting Libvirt set up on a host of your choice (in this case, my laptop).
Sigh. Nothing stays still in the tech world, does it? :)
The Archlinux Releng team have drastically altered the method for installing Archlinux since I wrote my previous article. In particular, they have dropped AIF and resorted to simple bash commands for installation.
This actually makes our life for Foreman much easier, but I thought I should write a small blog post to tell you how to use it.
It's been a while, so I thought I'd write about what's been keeping me busy this last few weeks. In short, I'm about to start working from home, so that's required me to really think about how I work, and how I can improve my productivity.
Location, Location, LocationAs with buying property, the location is critical. Until recently, my study has been on the ground floor of my house, and that room has only one tiny window in the corner.