At work, our ceph cluster is managed by the cephadm utility, which means that all ceph operations are launched within containers managed by podman. Our original batch of storage servers was running CentOS 7, which as of late 2023 is only a few months from reaching its official end-of-life date. The hardware is still good, so I just wanted to update operating systems while keeping ceph data volumes intact. I could find no official documentation for upgrading the OS out from under cephadm, so I forged my own way.

December 21, 2023 • Read more…

We recently expanded our Ceph cluster at work with six new RHEL 8 storage servers. All the Ceph services run in containers managed by cephadm. I ran into an interesting problem the first time I had to patch and reboot those servers after we had integrated them into the cluster.

December 18, 2023 • Read more…

When you launch a virtual machine on an OpenStack-managed network, the VM generally receives a random address in the active subnet. A researcher at work, however, needed a system for launching instances that have static addresses so he could preconfigure the local /etc/hosts file with all his machines.

May 17, 2023 • Read more…

One of our duties at work is monitoring and renewing SSL certificates for customer services. Now that certificate issuers regularly expire certificates after only one year, renewals are a regular occurance. Plus, we like to verify what protocols and alternative hostnames are supported by a specific service. This script helps.

February 03, 2023 • Read more…

I can’t say that I’m exactly addicted to Wordle, but I really like the game and try to play it most days. Since I regularly clean out my browser cache, I don’t have any statistical history to show for it, but I seem to guess most words on my fourth try, with fifth, third, and sixth tries next most common. Like any self-respecting geek, I have a strategy.

January 24, 2022 • Read more…

There has, evidently, been some shakeup in how to use Ansible to manage a Red Hat Satellite server.

December 17, 2020 • Read more…

In a 2020 technical meeting, someone asked about some SSH ProxyJump documentation I’d posted. I promised to follow up with a full configuration for using ProxyJump with a remote network, so here goes nothing.

April 03, 2023 • Read more…

I don’t have a strong economic ideology, though I’d say that my bias is to try first a market-based approach to most economic issues, turning to public-sector solutions only when the private sector is sorely wanting.

September 29, 2020 • Read more…

I put real work into using IPv6 in FreeBSD on a CenturyLink connection.

March 16, 2023 • Read more…

People scream “Fake news!” today with annoying consistency. Originally an attempt to identify published stories that ignored or wildly stretched the truth, the phrase has become a cynical way to dismiss stories we dislike.

January 16, 2020 • Read more…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and its open-source derivative CentOS 8 include a facility for setting system-wide cryptographic policies.

November 14, 2019 • Read more…

I needed to create for a client several AWS S3 buckets that would be used for system backups.

February 06, 2019 • Read more…

bash and rsync don’t necessarily work and play well together when rsync’s --exclude option is set as a variable.

July 17, 2018 • Read more…

Hacking a bash script to search for Amazon Machine Images.

January 26, 2018 • Read more…

I often use the AWS Command Line Interface to create or modify AWS assets, typically in the context of a bash shell script. I’ve found that I frequently need to extract information from one aws operation in order to complete another one.

What follows are some of what I’ve learned in that filtering operation.

December 08, 2017 • Read more…