A recent package upgrade seemed to break Puppet syntax highlighting horribly on my Fedora 32 laptop. Not only did syntax highlighting not work, it was actually completely wrong and confusing. It seemed as if the Puppet file type detection was missing, so vim was probably using some a syntax highlighter for a wrong type. To […]
LibreNMS image version 1.65-20 is now available in the AWS Marketplace. It is a a Cloud image that runs a pre-configured LibreNMS network monitoring system. It is the easiest and fastest way to get started with LibreNMS. Pricing is based on usage: there are no up-front license fees or other costs. This means you can […]
Ever had a case where you needed to use a name based Apache reverse proxy in front of some application server, while restring access to some proxied location at the same time? Here’s how to do it. First define a virtual host: Set the request headers (you are of course using TLS, aren't you): Proxy […]
The keys on your laptop are the kind of item you don't pay any attention until you lose them. The "O" key came off from my Carbon X1 keyboard a few days ago. I was able to postpone the ultimate solution by a couple of days by just pushing the "O" back. But doing that […]
Ubuntu 18.04 AWS images - and probably other Cloud images as well - have automated upgrades turned on. This is done via two systemd timers, apt-daily.timer and apt-daily-upgrade.timer. The timers kick of periodically as well as when an instance is rebooted. This sounds reasonable until you are provisioning something: you're unable to install or configure […]
Packer is an excellent tool for automating creation of machine images such as AWS AMIs or Docker container images. This is particularly useful when you need to scale up by spinning up instances on-demand or if you want to package software that is challenging to manage with a configuration management system. It is also extremely […]
We recently wrote a Nagios plugin for getting metrics from AWS Cloudwatch to LibreNMS. As the customer was ok with releasing it as open source here it is. It is written in Ruby - we like the language and we're also Puppet guys, so it felt like a natural choice for us. The plugin allows […]
As mentioned in our earlier blog post we created an "email to XMPP bridge" called milter-xmpp for forwarding alert emails from monitoring systems to an XMPP chatroom. It was known that if the connection to the XMPP server ever died the bridge would stop working, but we wanted to know how fast that would happen. […]
We have used XMPP (Jabber) for our internal discussions for years. In the recent years it seems that XMPP has lost some of its traction. For example, Google and Facebook used to use XMPP for instant message and Slack used to have an XMPP bridge in their service. All of those are now gone and […]
Over the years I've had to automate installation of Ubuntu and Debian installers a number of times. The primary motivation has always been to avoid all the questions about timezone, locale, partitioning and which packages to install and to not have to babysit the installation. In theory automating the installation is as simple as writing […]
Our puppet-snmpd module support SNMPv3 very well across a wide range of operating systems. Because o that SNMPv3 is what we use across the board in multiple environments. However, in the rare cases when I have to debug SNMP problems I can never remember the exact snmpwalk command-lines to use. So, here is the usual […]
For the Finnish speakers out there here's a recording of our webinar held in co-operation with Turku Business Region on 5th May 2020: Infrastruktuurin rakentaminen koodilla We cover the very basics of infrastructure as code, version control, quality assurance techniques and tools such as Puppet, Terraform, Ansible and Puppet Bolt.
Tässä webinaaritallenteessa esittelemme perusteet infrastruktuurin rakentamisesta koodilla, mukaan luettuna versionhallinnan, laadunvarmistuksen ja erilaiset työkalut kuten Puppetin, Terraformin, Ansiblen ja Puppet Boltin: Infrastruktuurin rakentaminen koodilla Toteutettu yhteistyössä Turku Business Regionin kanssa 5.5.2020.
This blog post is a part of this blog post series: In the previous blog post we talked about how to identify the resources that are being managed. This post will talk about the various ways of fetching the current state of the resources you wish to manage. Puppet manages a resource's properties by checking […]
This blog post is a part of this blog post series: In the previous blog post we talked about how to create a resource, a LibreNMS service, in the provider implementation. This blog post will talk about identifying a resource that is being managed. This is a requirement for modifying existing resources. Modifying existing resources […]
In the Puppet Bolt with a Puppet control repository blog post we showed how to integrate Puppet Bolt with an existing control repository. We used a static inventory file, which is ok for testing or when you have a few target nodes. However, if you have a Puppetserver running and are not using Bolt to […]
Occasionally when working with feature branch and updating types and providers you may run into environment leakage issues. They manifest themselves as issues that make no particular sense and are caused by the wrong version of a type/provider such as puppetlabs-apt (see this issue) leaking into your feature environment. This can happen when you update […]
OpenVPN and Wireguard are both used to provide secure, remote access to an organization's internal services such as network shares (NFS and Samba), desktops and servers (SSH and RDP) or web services. Linux is generally a first-class citizen as far as clients are concerned but with one exception: accessing DNS through the VPN tunnel. OpenVPN […]
As discussed in the introductory post one of the use-cases for Puppet Bolt is orchestration - running actions on multiple targets in a certain order, possibly using results of actions or data from some targets on other targets. Orchestration with Bolt plans is quite easy: you just create a plan with multiple TargetSpec parameters, each […]
NOTE: this article is somewhat outdated. Please refer to Serverless Puppet with control repo, Hiera, roles and profiles and Puppet Bolt instead. Puppet Bolt is an orchestration tool similar to Ansible. It is suitable for multiple use-cases: Running ad hoc commands on target nodes. We use this approach for testing Puppet feature branches before approving […]
