The Cult of Gary

Shortly after I celebrated the snow this morning, I spilled water all over my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. It’s pretty dead at this point. It turns on and pairs with my laptop. The problem is that the caps lock and Apple keys appear to be stuck on. There’s probably some other keys that are stuck on too, but it makes [...]

It’s Tuesday morning. It’s snowing hard (about 2cm in the last hour or so). I’m working from home and I don’t need to go anywhere today.

The first puppet book is due to come out on February 4. It’s written by James Turnbull. I’ve queued for my next book order. 
There’s a whole world of puppet stuff I don’t know yet. I feel I’m still clubbing my automation problems with the puppet hammer. I find skimming a book usually gets me over the hump.  Then [...]

Oh man. It’s brutal today. 
It snowed last night, but only about an inch or two. The VUL cancelled the first games of Hat League last night about about 9:30. When I was up at 7:00AM, the sky was clear. I figured it was going to be one of those nice days that ultimate shouldn’t have been cancelled.
Then [...]

I did a yum update this morning and it seems to have broken my puppet server.
I use a CNAME entry when connecting puppet clients to the master server. As far as I can tell, something happened to cause ruby to care more about how the certificates are set up. The puppet clients were expecting the [...]

If you’re trying to use screen on an EC2 instance with a non-root user, it probably doesn’t work for you. This is due to how the AMI build process messes with /etc/fstab. There is a thread about this in the AWS forms. I was running into this problem with one of the RightScale CentOS images. 
To fix it [...]

I need to connect an EC2 instance to a Cisco VPN server for various reasons. It turns out that this isn’t a trivial task. EC2’s use a custom 2.6.16 kernel, so it’s guaranteed to not match the headers included with your distro.
There’s an entry on the Rightscale Blog about how to successfully compile kernel modules for EC2’s. [...]

The Hyperic blog has a podcast interview with my new hero, Luke Kanies. I listened to it this morning while I was doing some other things. There’s some interesting insight into puppet. I think Luke does a good job of selling the concept of puppet. He says it’s only the beginning of the conversation on systems [...]

I’ve been running on blogger for awhile without a real domain name. A lot of people I know are running wordpress and seem to like it. I set up a hosted wordpress for Alexa a while back. It definitely looks nicer than blogger and has a lot more features. It’s a little easier to add [...]

I’m really loving puppet. I was able to build an application server from scratch in about 20 minutes. 19 of them were watching progress bars and syslog output. I can magically reconfigure the systems as I go and any work on do for one system can be applied to all of them.
I was hunting around [...]