Linux
I’ve been using Linux since 1998 when I was introduced to Slackware, and shortly afterwards to Red Hat 5.2. This section is a catch all for generally linuxy bits and pieces.
Articles on Linux
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Command-line cookbook dependency solving with knife exec
Machines built with Chef are configured by applying roles, which in turn define which cookbooks and recipes should be applied to meet a stated policy. Cookbooks and recipes have dependencies, which are solve by the Chef server, but which are tricky to extract after the fact. This short article shows you how to drive the Chef server API using knife exec to extract this information.
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A short introduction to Chrome OS
Google are everywhere these days. The number one search engine, a suite of hugely powerful mail and business applications, shopping, maps… but last year they seemed to move from the Software as a Service model to something rather different, with the release of their browser, and their operating system, Chrome. Richard Cohen explores what it’s all about.
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Advanced Dependency Management with Yum Shell
Many years ago, Red Hat had a (rather unfair) reputation of being a Linux distrubution forever crippled by a painful and clumsy package management system. “Dependency Hell” was the name used to describe the situation one could get into where circular dependencies arose, and the user became stuck. Dependency hell (which was always a bit of a myth) is a thing of the past now, especially since RHEL 5 where Red Hat adopted the powerful Yellowdog Updater, Modified (yum) which CentOS and Fedora had used for some time. However, just occasionally, problems arise which require some black-belt dependency solving. This article shows you how to use the yum-shell feature for just this purpose.
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How to print every nth line of a file
Sometimes a scripting language isn’t the right tool for the job. I’ve been working on a piece of code that parses huge logfiles. The test data needed to be representative across 24 hours - a simple slice wouldn’t do. I spent a few minutes knocking up a python script to print every 100th line when I stopped and thought ‘There’s a better way’!
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The Atalanta Systems Guide to Open Source Operating Systems
One of the most common questions for newcomers to Linux is “Which Linux version should I use?” or “Which Linux version is best?”. I’m also asked for my professional recommendations about which OS, or which distribution people should run, especially by people new to the idea of using an open-source operating system. I had this conversation again very recently, and felt it would be worth publishing my own experiences and recommendations.
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Building puppet and facter RPMs for CentOS or RHEL
In the first part of his excellent Puppet tutorial, John Arundel suggests that, given the speed with which Puppet develops and changes, and to keep things simple, Puppet should be installed from source. While for one box, this may be true, I tend to the view that you should use the native package manager wherever possible. In the case of CentOS or Redhat (the most common platforms for Puppet users, our survey says) , this means building RPMs. This article shows you how to build reusable puppet and facter RPMs, to make your life easier when you graduate from managing puppet on one server, to controlling a whole datacentre.
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Mixing it up with lighttpd and Sinatra
The Atalanta Systems website runs on Debian stable, on lighttpd. It’s lightweight, and incredibly fast. This blog is built on Sinatra. I wanted to run both services on the same machine.