Background Generally speaking, I refresh most of my systems pretty regularly, spurred on by security concerns, general hygeine, a desire to make sure the automation doesn't age out, and certificate expiration. Although I don't need to refersh systems due to certificate expiration, it has historically been the easiest indicator of …

I've already written a bit about using renovate to keep dependencies current using Renovate On Prem in Renovating GitLab Repos. This has been working well. However, there are a couple of twists that I figured I'd document in the event that people run into them. For single-repositories with public dependencies …

Most of the system administration work that I do has been automated using Ansible, as I've mentioned in posts here, including Deploying with GitLab. Now that I've got Renovate in place (Renovating GitLab Repos), I am starting to look at how to expand beyond my existing automations in order to …

Over the past week, I've been working on getting my various dependencies up to date in my GitLab instance repositories. The tool I'm using is Mend Renovate, an open-source solution by the folks at Mend (formerly WhiteSource). Let me state up front that I don't love the license here, it's …

I note with some amusement the fact that I wrote on this exact day last year about this same subject (in much more detail). The reason for the new message on this subject is that I'm still cleaning up some of the decisions I made when first using Bacula. The …

I've been an ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats) user for quite some time, using exclusively the open source version fo the stack. Generally it's works well and, with some exceptions, supports our mostly-Solaris based environment (using LX zones to host most of the beefier components, and using custom-built …

I last bought a MacBook Pro from Apple in November of 2019, in the midst of a bout of travel that was about to come to an end. In point of fact, I haven't used my trusty MacBook Pro much in the last 19 months, since the COVID-19 pandemic started …

After 18 months of using Bacula and sending copies of my data to the cloud (in this case, cloud I operate in another location) using an S3-compatible storage mechanism, I noticed I had a lot of data sitting around on my current server for backups. When I set out to …

Back in September of last year, I wrote in Bacula: 6 months on that cloud backups required part.0 in order to be recognized for automatic part retrieval. While this was mostly accurate, the critical file is actually part.1. As such, when referencing my own blog post when trimming …

MRs (Merge Requests) in GitLab are similar to PRs (Pull Requests) in GitHub, although the process and language around them are slightly different. The name specifically refers the the request to merge into another branch from a branch (or repository) that isn't the same. Simple enough. Most of the time …

One of the advantages of our recent pivot to gitlab is that I'm spending some time looking at existing repositories and doing some updates. Most of my repos are private and hosted on our private gitlab server. For public code, I generally place it on GitHub. With the recent automation …

In June, I mentioned in an article about Docker on SmartOS that we are doing some work with GitLab these days as a replacement for my venerable Gitolite server (and, to an increasing extent Jenkins). Deploying from Pelican I'm likely going to write more on GitLab in the near future …

This spring, there was a some movement on the Illumos/SmartOS front in implementing features to better support running LX zones with Linux variants. Since Docker images (generally) run on Linux underpinnings, support for running Docker images on SmartOS are dependent upon this support working correctly. For those familiar with …

As I've possibly mentioned here before, ClueTrust is using Elasticsearch to perform analysis of log information. Recently, I finally decided to take some our telemetry inforamtion and pull it in to Elasticsearch as a data exploration and statistical tool. Importing structured XML data into Elasticsearch Although there are some filters …

Quite a while back, RS wrote a comprehensive ansible role for handling Let's Encrypt certificate issuance and renewal. We both use this role extensively, which is why it was a significant issue when it suddenly started throwing type errors deep inside of the dnspython library during an nsupdate call in …

As we approach another World Backup Day, I figured it was time for me to revise my 2013 backup article for a more up-to-date view of what my backup situation is and what I am currently recommending. My basic backup strategy, as outlined in the previous article, hasn't changed significantly …

Putting pre-commit to use I mentioned in a previous post about pre-commit, a tool for maintaining code consistency through simple management of pre-commit checks. The first place I decided to give this a whirl was on my blog sites. As you may be aware, I moved my blog sites (both …

Introducing pre-commit hooks I recently became aware of the open-source project: pre-commit, which is "A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks." The key feature of pre-commit is that it creates an execution environment for itself in order to enable running hooks without messing with (or creating conflicts with …

Originally this was going to contain a brief Bacula, 6 months on section at the start. Of course, that became much too detailed, so I split them up, however I would encourage you to read it. Restore Testing Backup is the most obvious part of doing backups. Almost everyone's aware …

It's been about six months since I originally wrote Welcome Bacula, describing our transition to Bacula from our previous solution (and a bit of history even before that). If you haven't read it, it might be worth a read. Although not quite 6 months since I wrote the first piece …