SysAdvent Calendar

OpenShift is currently en vogue in the company. The ease of use and scaleability found in a container based system allows us to automate the build and deployment steps of containers through software like Kubernetes/OpenShift. Jekyll We have visited Jekyll in several previous blog posts. Our techblog and the SysAdvent ...

Thruk comes natively with Naemon, and is a free and open source full drop in replacement web interface for Nagios, Icinga and Shinken. These are flexible tools for alerting us when something goes horribly wrong, and Thruk adds a few tricks for even better monitoring. With this blog entry I ...

Lately I have been working a bit with the monitoring platform Zabbix, and the instance in question is backed by the PostgreSQL RDBMS. ...

fail2ban is one of several tools designed to protect other services by blocking unwanted and possibly repeating activities. Its most common use case is probably protecting the SSH server from bruteforce attacks, where repeatedly failed login attempts will be generously rewarded with an iptables firewall ban or some other variant ...

OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) builds on Docker for container-technology and Kubernetes for orchestration of those containers. OpenShift solves the network annoyances in Kubernetes and adds features like authentication and authorization, multi-tenancy, source-to-image (S2I) and templating of applications. To easily get started with OpenShift development, the OpenShift client (oc) includes an ...

Everything was ready. The deploy should have been clean and fast. But then, the developers had added just another language module. Not a big thing, just something you could have pulled ...

The first time I successfully fired up a container I was pretty excited with the potential this tool had to make a lot of everyday tasks much easier. For example when I had a colleague ask for package xyz from EPEL/PPA made available from our internal mirrors, I could just ...

Sometimes you come across problems with websites that normal configuration does not address usefully. A case in point was a PHP-based application that from time to time returned a 302 to a login page instead of the front page, which is not optimal when you serve news articles. Our solution ...

While dropping root account passwords completely in favour of sudo is an option in many cases, we prefer keeping root passwords around for when we need direct console access. We keep these passwords in an encrypted password-store (we will write about this in a later blog post this season), and ...

While dynamic DNS is a wonderful tool for automation and orchestration, tools for easy cleaning up and logging changes are needed. This post describes a couple of scripts that may help. ...

The staff at Redpill Linpro will this December again run an advent calendar with sysadmin-related content! Our season three of the SysAdvent Calendar will kick off, as expected, on December 1st. As with the original sysadvent blog, the article contents this year will range from containers and openshift to ansible ...

We hope you have enjoyed the articles in our second SysAdvent season! This is the last post in this years sysadvent. If you want to read more, we have other blog entries at our main site, our techblog, our employees have personal blogs that are aggregated at Planet Redpill Linpro, ...

For the wallscreens within the operations department, we currently use Raspberry Pies and provision those using Ansible. We found that the USB sockets on a typical LCD TV do not provide enough power for a Raspberry Pi model 3, so we went for the cheaper – although a little less ...

Duplicity is a piece of software that can perform encrypted backups to remote storage over the network. It uses the rsync algorithm to implement incremental backups, thus minimising the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network and stored remotely. The GNU Privacy Guard is used to ...

A few of systemd features that helps you and your fellow sysadmins. At 3am, I want to sleep. I do not want SMS with “Service X is down”, and I do not want my systems to wake the on-call personnel, so they can scratch their heads and call me about ...