Running IT like a Soccer Team
While thinking about Devops culture metaphors (I like them a lot and have used and abused them through out my career) I enjoyed David Lutz post "Running IT like a rock band" but there was something 
about that metaphor that bothered me. I also remember a tweet stating something along these lines "Show me your rockstar developer and I'll show you your bottleneck" and the analogy of a soccer team as opposed to the Rock band started to materialize. When John Willis presented at the Silicon Valley Devops last month his 100% culture focused "State Of The Union" presentation added another layer. In particular his emphasis on systems thinking (the fact that I've always had "systems" in my job title is most likely not a coincidence).
It then was clear to me why I was having this second thoughts about "Running IT like a rock band", that is, I like to think of the IT Industry as a science based industry, and in that regard I think a soccer team has much more in common with IT than a Rock Band, here is why.
Ship Apache HTTPd Logs to Graylog2 Via Rsyslog
This is a quick recipe and a list of resources on how to ship apache logs to a graylog2 server using rsyslog which is the default system logger on CentOS 6. Tested on CentOS 6.4, Graylog2 0.9.6, Apache HTTPd 2.2.15.
By the way if like me, before I wrote this post, you are wondering about the origin of using the word that commonly describes a fresh cut piece of a tree for "our" IT logs then click on the image (talking root cause here), and don't forget to donate to wikipedia!
Handling directory copy and syncing aka “recursive copy” in Ansible 1.1
While working on the Matterhorn Ansible playbook I've had to find a solution for copying the content of a directory from the host running the playbook to a group of hosts.
Turns out there are at least 3 ways of doing this and I thought summarizing them in one post would help other folks, worst case scenario it'll serve as a reminder for myself, so here were go.
Ansible playbook YAML “one flag per line” syntax
I've started playing around with Ansible for Command Orchestration and Config Management and so far so good. Since I was not happy with having all the module flags in one line in my playbooks I looked for a way to break them into multiple lines.
Since Ansible playbooks are written in YAML one google search later I was on my way, here is how it works at this point, or at least according to my testing using Ansible 1.1 on a CentOS 6.3 box.
---
- name: "creating a config file from a rendered template"
template: >
src=/some/path/foobar.j2
dest=/some/pathfoobar.conf
owner=root
group=wheel
mode=0777
is equivalent to
--- - name: "creating a config file from a rendered template" template: src=/some/path/foobar.j2 dest=/some/pathfoobar.conf owner=root group=wheel mode=0777
2012 Year In Blogging
I thought this was pretty cool !
JaimeGago.com 2012 Analytics Reports By WordPress.com /Jetpack 
DevOps Twitter List
Someone was complaining of DevOps withdrawals on devops-toolchain, I'm getting all juice on twitter (quite frankly more than I can digest) so here are the folks/accounts I follow that feed my DevOps cravings
Jenkins CI behind Apache Httpd mod_proxy +Virtual Host config
All relevant info is here but if you're looking for a combo Apache httpd Vhost (name based) + proxy to put your Jenkins server at say "mybuilding.server.org" here is one that work (assuming you have DNS "stuff" set properly of course)
NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName mybuilding.server.org ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/ ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/ ProxyRequests Off ProxyPreserveHost On <proxy http://127.0.0.1:8080*> Order deny,allow Allow from all </proxy> </VirtualHost *:80>
Running Rundeck Behind Apache Using mod_proxy on CentOS/RHEL6
As I just got Rundeck working behind Apache httpd with mod_proxy and since I didn't find a dedicated tutorial on the inter webs I thought to make a quick summary. 
ChefConf 2012: I was there!
Last week I attended the inaugural ChefConf 2012, the 1st conference about Chef organized by the company at its origin i.e. OpsCode; here are some "post-conf thoughts".
If there was only one thing to note from this gathering it would be this: Amazing Community. These folks lead by example when it comes to being friendly, positive, knowledgable and willing to share, the "No Asshole Rule" is a default in real life and online. As a matter of fact even though I'm just getting started with Chef I already feel like a member of the tribe. Although I have to admit attending ChefConf 2012 wasn't a coincidence as I've been reading, listening, participating to a lot of DevOps conversations for "some" time now and Configuration Management tools such as Chef are a corner stone.
Juniper VPN client aka Network Connect on RHEL 6 (x86_64)
Ok this has taken me quite an effort so hopefully it will save you some time.
On my system RHEL 6 (x86_64) this is what it took to have the Juniper VPN client (aka Network Connect) running.
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Planned books:
- Lean IT by Steven C Bell, Michael A Orzen
Current books:
-
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce
-
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim
Recent books:
- Visible Ops by Kevin Behr,Gene Kim and George Spafford
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener
- The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll
- Apple Training Series: Xsan 2 Administration: A Guide to Designing, Deploying, and Maintaining Xsan by Robert Kite
