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Recently I had a need to create a bootable sd card containing OpenBSD. Since my day to day machine is a MacBook Air with no cdrom drive this initially seemed difficult. It turned out to be much easier than I expected thanks to VirtualBox raw disk access. Raw hard disk access can be dangerous, mainly because there’s a risk you use the wrong device and blow away things you actually need, so be careful and make sure you know you’re using the right physical device. ...

I genuinely dislike email, yet it’s a necessary part of working and communicating these days. I suppose there is occasional value found in the community of certain mailing lists, but generally the way email is used today is simply more of a distraction or interruption. A while back Steve Losh described how to setup Mutt the way he likes. It was an interesting read because he was detailed, technical and clearly prefers very customizable tools. I agree with him, and although I’ve long since abandonded Mutt I was motivated to describe my version of powerful, customizable, terminal based email management. ...

I spend a decent amount of time in org-mode, using Emacs + iTerm2 on a Macbook Air. I fixed a recent annoyance I encountered when using Emacs org-mode to track time for a project. Org-mode has a handy time tracking feature and as the manual points out both C-S-<up/down> S-M-<up/down> can be used to call various functions for adjusting recorded time. In particular I wanted to use org-timestamp-down to add some time for a CLOCK item I had forgotten to start before a Skype call. ...

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that remind me why I love the classic unix tools. Here’s a quick way to fill in cookbook_versions for a chef environment using awk. Of course, this is a ridiculously simple usage of awk. There’s plenty more that can be done with just a single line of awk.

It seems in the chef community lately there’s a growing trend for cookbooks to be kept in separate repos, or even separate branches in a single repo. I wanted to share the script I used to split out the community-cookbooks repo for Heavywater I knew the general git commands I needed to use, but it did take a few local trial runs to get it exactly as I wanted. To create the actual repos on github I made use of the excellent hub script. ...

There’s a thought provoking article by David Mitchell at The Guardian site right now. It’s relatively short and worth reading, and I say that even as someone who isn’t all that interested in the NHS project that frames the article’s opening paragraphs. Mitchell makes two points that I found myself both agreeing with as a developer and sysadmin, and leading me to further thought. First, from David Mitchell in I want to talk to you about the NHS… ...

One topic frequently tossed around at the recent Opscode summit was a re-org of the cookbooks repository. No more monolothic cookbooks repo on github, instead replaced by single cookbook repos, making it much easier to pull and contribute to a single cookbook. @jtimberman will be leading this effort. On a slightly unrelated note, it looks like @dysinger posted a handy little cleanup script:

The first historic Opscode Community Summit is officially over. See yesterdays post for a basic description of the event and structure. After another brief introduction, topics were discussed, a schedule arranged and the agenda was live. Topics for day two included: Managed Nodes a.k.a external entities Chef for big data projects, such as hadoop, cassandra and similar Ticket/triage process Network monitoring, it sucks Feature roadmaps, both short and long term ...

Opscode Summit day one has passed. I had to skip the sponsored dinner tonight, so for others it might still be going on. While there were lot’s of great sessions going on, and a great variety of people (seemed like 100+ in attendance), one thing stood out to me: The Chef community is awesome. To be fair, there are many great tech communities but the advantage the chef community has, and devops culture in general, is how many different skill sets are necessarily brought together combined with a culture of friendliness. Networking gurus, SysAdmin fanatics and passionate Devs are all brought together to solve some of the toughest challenges in modern computing infrastructures. ...