Molecule

I swear, this is the week I’ll do a write up about my lab.. Lots of interesting articles this week! I’ve been reading a lot more about DevOps and security lately. I’m hoping to get some security related projects labbed up in the next few week. This is an interesting take on incorporating Devops into big business culture. I work at a company of 500+ and some of the examples Sacha Labourey mentioned are totally relevant to my experience. This very well thought out and put together piece on Ansible and Molecule testing had a great balance of technical details and examples. Someone on reddit asked for a good first playbook to write. I think the basics like adding packages and users is a great place to start. My package and users role were the first I uploaded to Galaxy and usually the first I import for new projects. Speaking of Ansible Galaxy, they’re still working on adding user ratings for roles. A preview is up. buildahomelab.com is hosted on a shared cpanel/wordpress server. I just wanted to get writing. But this article discussed setting up a WordPress blog using Ansible and Terraform. In the future I plan to migrate it to something I built, maybe use something like Pelican. OKD the community version of OpenShift is available on CentOS now! Some of the talks from AnsibleFest 2018 are available online. I think i’ll probably listen to: “Migrating from Puppet” and “Balancing Security and Velocity”. At a local Red Hat User Group (RHUG) meetup in Chicago I was able to hear an interesting talk about Ansible operators for Kubernetes. Keith Resar’s notes are available here. I really want to start working with Go more. This looked like a pretty useful collection of string utils for Go. The author of GetADevJob.com shares their experience learning to code and land interviews for software development positions. It’s pretty interesting to hear about someone going from little experience to full time development! Michael DeHaan had an interesting blog on ssh, specifically how he’s using ssh-agent in his new app Vespene.io. This was an interesting post on using git-submodules. I’ve used them for projects in the past and they’re pretty convenient for managing multiple repos/dependencies. I saw this DevOps interview question tips post on Twitter a couple times. We’ve been interview for a new Linux Admin at my company, and these do seem like good questions to run by someone. If anything they spark some intriguing conversation. Some Docker image build tips. So many Docker guides discuss running docker images, but they don’t always explain how to build Docker images. Oracle’s changes to JDK have a lot of developers talking. It seems like the consensus is that OpenJDK look very appealing. Red Hat posted about using OpenJDK and the differences compared to Oracles JDK. This neat little tool “cloc” shows how many lines of code a project has. I’d like to take a look at what my Ansible roles look like and see if there are any outliers. I’ve been planning to do some Ansible basics posts and will be releasing one about using different “when” tests for Ansible tasks tomorrow. Keep an eye out!

I had all kinds of ceph osd issues in my lab this week. Spend most of that identifying bad/failing hardware. It seems to be more stable now so I can get back to testing! Links for this week: A list of available online tech classes from Universities. Ouroboros keeps popping up in my feeds, it uses python to update your running docker containers. I can never call out linuxserver.io enough, they have some really solid docker images and may deploying new apps to my Homelab a breeze! Ansible 2.7.1 was released, looks like a lot of bug fixes, also changed some things with the yum modules, specifically how it handles lists (threw off one of my playbooks when i upgraded to 2.7). A guide to running AWX (Ansible Tower upstream) on MiniShift. Which leads into the next link.. I was referencing this guide to using Kubespray for a mini lab project (AWX runs on Kubernetes too). Jeff Geerling wrote up a quick article about using Molecule for Ansible role testing. It even has some tidbits about using TravisCI. I referenced this when adding testing to my package role to get that cool “build passing” badge on GitHub. Just need to hit the others now. All the Ansible testing focus lately is coming from the updates about to roll out on Ansible Galaxy, they’re previewing the new features now. Hashicorp released some documentation on secrets management, it’s very clean and well put together. Dell recently released a new version of OpenManage Enterprise, it’s a pretty convenient way for me to manage the dell hardware in my home lab (firmware, logs, console). I recently for an iPhone XR for work and took some pictures with it, they look pretty great! I’m gonna go back to tinkering with this new iPhone, have a safe and fun Halloween!

There are a lot of interesting happenings with Ansible this week. I’ve been watching the tweets for AnsibleFest and am pretty excited to see what they announce. Here’s a roundup of some interesting links I read through this week: Interesting post on web scraping, I was looking into a way to collect results from the upcoming elections since most state’s dont have an accesible API showing election results so you have to rely on news sites. A big list of programming courses you can take. Had some Mongo/python, but also ccna, aws, game development, and general test automation. Hot off Ansiblefest, Digital Ocean has a great tutorial on Ansible/Molecule testing. Ansible performance tweak have always been interesting for me, mitogen keeps popping up on my radar. Some general info on debugging Ansible plays, this covered some things I do on the regular while working with Ansible. So I started playing with Molecule, and looked at LXD as an alternative to Docker, it’s actually really slick and for most cases. It’s like docker, but if docker looked more like a virtual machine. More on Molecule, this post was a little more detailed and relevant to what I was doing. BeeGFS is a new filesystem to play with, I spent some time with btrfs a while back and it was a good refresher on filesystems. This post covered how to deploy BeeGFS with Ansible. Ansible started leaving more info on their community projects. A cool 10G switch that’s low on power usage from Mikrotik that I really want. I’ll be digging into Molecule/TravisCI this week and I’m looking to do another tutorial post on that. I also finalized my home Proxmox cluster and want to write about that!

Here’s a roundup of some interesting links I read through this week: A cool looking ESP32-based board with PoE Caleb Doxsey discusses using Kubernetes for pet projects. Would love to try this out, $5 a month. Click is great tool for making command line python apps. Ansible-Lockdown is a pretty slick collection of Ansible security roles. After seeing ansible-lockdown, a coworker mentioned dev-sec, another collection of Linux security tools, including some Ansible and Chef. Ansible 2.7 was released, go reboot all of your servers with the long-awaited “reboot” module. Ansible Oracle/Guru Jeff Geerling discusses the future of community ansible projects, including some interesting tidbits on the future of Galaxy (community rankings coming!). When I first started learning python, dictionary structures were really hard to wrap my head around, wish I had a dictionary tutorial like this. Interesting run through of building an API with Flask and Connexion. Slightly off topic, but I spend a lot of time 3D printing, Ultimaker Cura released version 3.5. I was helping my girlfriend put a service on a VPS server, it worked out that systemd was the easiest way to get a service configured. This post was useful referencing how to run a node app with systemd. Molecule has been on my to-do for a few weeks now, turns out Ansible is adopting the project and future Galaxy roles will be rated on whether they use Molecule tests. This post on Molecule and Vagrant seemed like a good place to start. That’s it for this week, enjoy the fall weather! Feel free to send any recommendations to noe@engonzal.com