DevOps Engineer, Husband & Dad
Recently I’ve been tasked with creating a central syslog server. These are very useful when one maintain couple of boxes (or couple hundred and more) as it can provide a single point of checking out on what’s up with the machines. If it’s combined properly with metrics it serves as a super-boosting way of maintaining the overview of the entire infrastructure.
When it comes to nginx, it defaults to storing log files in plain text. It’s a sane default and I don’t see a good reason to ship it in any other fashion. However, sometimes the needs change. It was the case for me — I’m using rsyslog1 for all of the OS logs and it felt natural to me to have nginx invited to join the party. As rsyslog client is pushing all of its logs further to the centralized server part already, I wanted to have nginx logs included in the stream.
Majority of time I spend on my Mac, I do it in terminal1. The more I can get away without switching to anything else, the better. MAS2 is one of these nifty little utilities that simply makes your life that much easier. While it’s quite mature software already and there’s not that much excitement in the latest release, I’m using it as opportunity to spread the word as not everyone is aware of this little bugger.3
After years of using Ghost, last month I got back to WordPress as my blogging platform. Overall, that was the right choice to make, long overdue really. Using something that is pretty much a standard for running blogs these days makes things a lot easier. Additionally, unlike many others, I’m not allergic to Gutenberg changes that were introduced with version 5 — they’re OK, work for me. Here’s a quick list of things that changed in last ~2 months:
After seven years of maintaining PPA with custom packages for Debian, I now decided to finally drop and close it. I no longer use Debian as my main Linux distribution hence I have no need nor interest in providing any builds for it.
That being said, I also decided to pack the whole repo as is for anyone willing to either pick it up or to simply have a look on how this was done for the last few years.
I also need to give the credit where the credit is due — Julien’s Valroff’s tutorial titled Build i386 packages on amd64 brought me into world of proper Debian package building. I’m not even sure how old it is, but it’s still valid today.
As far as it comes to the software stack, the only thing I changed not long ago was finally the switch git-buildpackage. All the rest is the same — cowbuilder, pbuilder, quilt, gpg, reprepro and simple nginx in front.
Package with the repo contents can be found on the PPAs website. It was fun and useful for the time being, thanks for the ride!
It was about time to clean a little bit up my PPA. What was removed and briefly why:
As I’m playing with MATE lately I decided to port topmenu applet to Debian. I haven’t test it as of yet, but there’s no real reason for it to not work properly as it should.
That’s it so far. If you have any suggestions or you want to report any bugs, catch me on twitter.
Snappy Ubuntu Core has been announced two days ago. I was counting that sooner or later there will be some alternative to Project Atomic and here we are. What I found a bit surprising was the immediate compatibility with Microsoft Azure. I also found this statement:
Microsoft loves Linux[…]
Creepy.
All is fine and whatever, but there’s not many places you can play with Snappy on. Or are there? How about SmartOS?
Well, Canonical delivers KVM image that may be converted and deployed as an VM.
