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 …

We've heard it all before: AWS is expensive, and you need to watch out for the hidden sharp edges of their pricing model. Today I provide a small lesson in that concept. History ClueTrust has run through a number of backup methodologies over the year, originally using Retrospect (when they …

In 2018, I wrote about the move to convert Gaige's Pages to a static generation model. I followed this up in mid-December of that year describing the drop in processing and response time. After 18 months of running the site (and Cartographica's Blog as well) on Pelican, I wanted to …

The background Many years ago, all of my systems were pets. I tried to make them easier to manage by standardizing on a single operating system (MacOS X Server at the time) and used management tools that were part of that suite. As time moved forward, Apple decided to concentrate …

I wasn't originally going to write this up on the blog, but considering that we've just finished our transition from our old backup software (BRU, no link) to Bacula community edition and considering that it's World Backup Day, it seemed like it would make sense. As many of you are …

This weekend, Rob and I had been testing the use of hardware keys to secure ssh sessions, especially for back-end console access and certain administrative functions. Since the hardware keys are a special case, and cannot be added to the ssh-agent, we were slinging around a fair number of command …

OK, now that I have your attention with the catchy title, let me get right into the reason behind this post. Rob has been doing a lot of work lately on a set of roles to provision raspberry pi systems. I'm grateful for the work in this area, because frankly …

At ClueTrust, we use a lot of automation to run our systems. It's mostly how just a couple of us can manage hundreds of virtual servers and keep them up-to-date and operational. A few years back, I moved from using Puppet to Ansible, mostly at the suggestion of RS, who …