Database Flashback: The Lesson I Learned This piece is not about features or products. It's about lessons that we learn or not. The one I learned some twenty-three years ago was: "Don't ask for troubles and do one thing at a time."
Containers Docker: Logn Errors Recently, I spent some time trying to find why I can not push my just-from-the-own image into the GitLab project registry. The message "illegal base64 data at input" is a bit confusing, but the solution is simple.
Ansible Ansible: Dynamic Inventory I know that Ansible could use as inventory virtually anything, including scripts. However, all inventories on my day job are static, and we keep them in a source repository, and until now, I haven't had a chance to create or use one.
A Simple Token Generator My friend's given me a perfect tip: "Whenever I need a random sequence of characters, I use OpenSSL rand functions." And to be a bit fancy, I pick the value
Terraform Sensitive data in Terraform Terraform is probably the best choice to manage your infrastructure as a code. And if we are talking code, let's see how you can keep sensitive information away from your code repository.
Ansible Ansible: Markdown Reports The previous post promised a simple reporting solution and two potential possibilities. Now it's time to go through the solution that would help you with report publications. The diagram from
Ansible Ansible: Format e-mail body. The whole automation idea is to minimize or exclude humans from the process. However, you need to notify users and sometimes you should do it in style.
Ansible Ansible: Simple Reports Any IT system, bigger than a chihuahua, ought to produce reports. It does not matter how they look, but it should generate and share information that humans can read.
Ansible Ansible, YAML, and JSON Ansible is very flexible with data types, and easily transforms primitives and even JSON strings, but from time to time you need to process and transform something a bit more complex than String to Boolean conversions.
Ansible Ansible: Iterations Iterations in Ansible are not first-class citizens. The language allows you a single task loop with one nested iteration. Anything more sophisticated than that should be implemented as a separate module. Again, the include_tasks command gives us a helping hand.
Ansible Ansible: Selections Let's discuss selections in Ansible: if-then-else and case/switch operators. Ansible offers conditional execution for single tasks, blocks, and task imports. In addition, it allows effectively simulate if-then selection.
Now on Telegram The Ghost blog platform offers powerful integration capabilities. From the early days, we have enabled RSS feed, available practically out of the box. In addition, pre-configured integrations with modern automation
MySQL Ghost Upgrade: A Bit of MySQL This morning I accidentally brought down this site. The Ghost CLI told me that there is a minor upgrade to version 4.11.0. Unfortunately, even though the start version
Ansible Ansible: Subroutines The second post in the Ansible: Control Structures series describes using Ansible core components to emulate subroutines - procedures and "packages." The whole paradigm of Ansible is the opposite of
Ansible Ansible: Control Structures Red Hat Ansible is a powerful and easy-to-learn automation product. Simplicity is one of the basic principles of the language. Yet, any task a titbit more complex than installing and starting an HTTPD server requires good old procedural control flows.
Ansible Ansible Variables: a Rookie Mistake The mistake I made could be excused for Java Developer, but not for a guy who spends days with Ansible. The root cause is the different variable visibility model. Red Hat Ansible does not appreciate role or play boundaries and dynamically evaluates a variable value for each impacted host.
SSH Unappreciated SSH Client Config Some IT folks how are fluent with the server configuration of the SSH daemon. But I can hardly name a few who knows how helpful client SSH configuration is.
Git Automate Housekeeping For one who does automation for living, it's okay to be a bit lazy. So let's talk about how I keep my local git repositories in order with minimal effort.
Ansible Ansible and Git Submodules Let's discuss a problem I faced, moving from Ansible to the Ansible Tower. The problem is how to maintain multiple inventories scattered all over new projects effectively.
Ansible Ansible: Conditional Playbooks I have praised Ansible tags all about the previous post. Unfortunately, tags don't go along with Ansible Tower's complex workflows. Let me guide you through the playbook transformation we've done. The answer to this challenge is extra variables.
Ansible Ansible: the Power of Tags Let's talk about why you should use tags in your Ansible playbooks. For starters, I'll lecture you a bit about tags in the Ansible language, and then show you how we use them in a real-life scenario.
Ansible Ansible Tower: Dynamic Usernames The slow drift toward the Red Hat Ansible Tower uncovers more and more compatibility issues, so I have to go back and revisit some decisions and make sure that the same code would fit both worlds.
Ghost Ghost 4: the Major Upgrade This small how-to could be helpful if you have a standalone Ghost platform and plan to upgrade it to the latest version - Ghost 4.4.0.
Containers Maven Project with Docker Compose This little tweak streamlines the development lifecycle and simplifies build and test operations. If you build something with Docker and Apache Maven you could find this article useful.
Ansible Ansible: Consume SQL*Plus Output A simple way to consume Oracle Database data in Ansible playbooks without extensive Python or PL/SQL coding or 3rd party modules.
