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.
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.
If (like me) you find yourself re-installing your machines a lot (and let's face it, that's what Foreman is for), then a package cache can save you a huge amount of data traffic. There are many ways to achieve this, but I'll describe how I'm using apt-cacher-ng to help me save data.
Apt-cacher-ng is particularly helpful since it can support almost any OS - the documentation has instructions for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, and even Archlinux.