Introduction

OpenBSD 7.5 is a UNIX-like operating system. The project’s “efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography”. Compared to modern Linux distributions OpenBSD is very compact, but comes with the usual packages and ports tree you would expect from any *BSD operating system. This article shows the process of installing OpenBSD 7.5 with virt-install, making it a virtualization guest on Linux.

Downloading the ISO installer

First you need to download the OpenBSD 7.5 ISO installer on your Linux system. On most systems the amd64 install75.iso is the correct choice. Check the OpenBSD download page for other architectures.

What follows is an minimalistic, bare-bones guide to get you started with Red Hat subscriptions quickly. No spoon-feeding, no introductions, just get your first RHEL* system into a blessed state quickly, while your attention can still keep up. 

We assume you are starting from scratch and generally have no glue. We also assume that your boss has punished you with this task, not your mom, and therefore you represent a company, not a Sapiens specimen that looks like you. If this is not the case, then it isn’t.

Introduction

Being able to build IT infrastructure always having to involve an IT, operations or platform team seems be a big priority for many organizations. This is understandable because processes typically slow down to a crawl when they have to pass organizational boundaries. Also, teams responsible for infrastructure would not want to spend time on routine requests if possible. Provisioning infrastructure is no exception here. It is possible to create a custom solution to enable self-service infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform, but that takes a fair amount of effort. In this article we focus on open source and commercial open source offerings that make enabling self-service infrastructure provisioning easier.

There are a myriad of ways to login to Linux systems using Azure AD credentials. Photo credit.

Introduction

There are several ways to do Linux Azure AD authentication. Note that Azure AD was renamed “Microsoft Entra ID” recently, but in this article we’ll use its old name, at least for now. In other words you can log in to your Linux hosts Azure Active Directory (“Azure AD”) credentials in various ways. Azure, Microsoft’s public Cloud, builds on top of Azure AD. In fact, your Azure users, groups, roles and role assignments are stored in Azure AD.

Introduction

Red Hat Openshift is essentially an opinionated Kubernetes distribution that comes with a large number of features such as CI/CD and container registry built-in; for a full list of differences look at the Red Hat OpenShift vs. Kubernetes. Openshift comes in a number of versions, some commercial and some open source. The naming history of Openshift is particularly confusing. That’s why I wrote this blog post where I attempt to list most Openshift versions and variants and outline their main differences.

Automation use-cases in the Cloud

Johan Wennerberg, a Solution Architect for Red Hat Nordics in Stockholm gave presentation in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn. In his presentation titled “Gain robust repeatability as selfservice, by automating your automation” he listed several automation use-cases in the Cloud. Each of these automation use-cases is made possible by automation stacks. The automation stacks are technology stacks that produce business value through automation. In practice you need to build your automation stacks on top of infrastructure as code.

Overview of Ansible quality assurance

Ansible is an IT automation engine which you can use for configuration management, orchestration and device management, among other things. While you can get started fast with Ansible, ensuring high-quality, bug-free code can be challenging. Moreover, there’s not that much official, high-quality or coherent documentation available on Ansible quality assurance best practices. While low hanging fruit like Ansible variable validation are available, they are not emphasized in official documentation.

Microsoft Azure provides a metrics and monitoring framework called Azure Monitor. With it you can monitor your Cloud infrastructure and services running there. You can view graphs of the metrics, alert on threshold and all that usual stuff, just like in AWS Cloudwatch.

Some Cloud resources like Azure Functions expose “a limited number of useful metrics” in Azure Monitor. This is a polite way of saying that the metrics are “completely useless” for most intents and purposes. For example, an Azure Function that gets triggered a few times a week on an irregular schedule by real people you don’t really have any useful metrics in Azure Monitor which you could alert on if something is off.

While rspec-puppet documentation is quite decent, it does not really explain how to test classes that get their parameters via Hiera lookups, such as profiles in the roles and profiles pattern. Several parameters related to Hiera are listed in the rspec-puppet configuration reference, but that’s all. The other documentation you find on the Internet is generally outdated and not applicable for modules converted with PDK.

In this article we show how to test an “ipa_client” class that uses lookups to get its parameter from Hiera. It used to be a profile that was later separated from the control-repo into a separate module, which means that rspec-puppet does not have access to the control-repo’s Hiera data.

I wrote this article to better understand all the pieces called “AD” or “Active Directory” in Microsoft Azure fit together. The pieces are as follows:

• Active Directory (AD): The is the classic on-premise Active Directory with LDAP, Kerberos, group policies and all that. Traditionally Windows machines in larger environments have been domain-joined to on-premise AD.

• Active Directory Federation services (AD FS): adds support for modern web-SSO protocols (SAML, OAuth 2.0 and OIDC) to on-premise Active Directory.