I have a need to create both some Ubuntu and CentOS Vagrant boxes for a project I am working on. Normally I would have created them on my local machine, uploaded the artifacts to an Amazon S3 bucket and then published them using Atlas↗ (formally Vagrant Cloud↗ ). However in the past month HashiCorp↗ have updated Atlas so that you can now build Packer↗ templates directly within Atlas and publish the artifacts as Vagrant Boxes, all free of charge. This is great for me as it means that I will not incur the hosting and distribution costs. ...

In my previous post I wrote about launching a CentOS 7 Virtual Machine in Azure↗ using Terraform↗ . As you can see from my original configuration I was adding a password and my own user. This worked well, the machine launched and I could access it as expect and sudo to root. However, when it came to using Terraforms built-in provisioner I started to have problems as the commands I was running need root privileges, when I tried using sudo it would sit there waiting for the password to entered. ...

As regular readers will know I really like the tools provided by Hashicorp↗ and today I found an excuse to use one. I needed to bring up a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure↗ . I hadn’t logged into Azure for quite a while so imagine my shock when I opened the dashboard, it’s not that great and the beta of the new one isn’t that brilliant either. It was so bad I tweeted about it …. ...

Last night I did some I haven’t done for a while and watched the opening episode of a new Dragons Den↗ series while it was being aired. After a short time I found myself less interested in what was happening on screen and more interested in what was happening to the contestants (this is after all a primetime game show isn’t it?) websites during what should be a predicted spike in traffic. ...

Around this time last year I blogged about Upgrading my servers to CentOS 7, the post contained a link to a script which I wrote to deploy a Puppet Master & Agent and some updated instructions for installing on RHEL / CentOS 7. As those instructions no longer work, and I needed to install a Puppet Master to have a play with I decided to update the installation script. After a little reading it looks like installing a Puppet Master with Apache and Passenger is a little old fashioned since the release of Puppet Server↗ . ...

UPDATE 26/07/2015 In typical fashion, a few weeks after posting this Docker themselves released a much better version than mine, you can install it using the following commands; Update to CentOS 7 Docker install one-liner 1/2 c s d u y o r s c l t k e e - m r s c S t r L l u n h e t n h t a e p b l s l l : e o / - / d w g o o e c r t k l . e d d r o c & k a e m r p . ; c & o a m m / p ; | s s y h s t e m c t l s t a r t d o c k e r What follows is the original, now mostly redundant post. ...

As I have mentioned a few times on this blog I tend to use DigtialOcean↗ to spin up servers for testing and to host some of my projects. I also still use CentOS 7 as my preferred OS. Each time I boot a droplet I run few a couple of tasks to get the server how I prefer it. Run a yum update Enable swap Install & configure Fail2Ban Enable firewalld Install vim-enhanced, deltarpm & enable EPEL↗ As I am lazy and sometimes re-launch instances several times when working on a project I decided to write a quick script to do the above so I don’t have to↗ . ...

I am going to be playing with OpenStack over the next few weeks so I decided to create a Vagrant script which would bootstrap a working OpenStack Kilo↗ installation using RedHat RDO↗ . It uses my CentOS 7 Vagrant box↗ and works with both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion. To get it up and running create a folder for the Vagrantfile to live; Quick OpenStack Kilo Installation 1/4 m k d i r - p ~ / M a c h i n e s / O p e n S t a c k / Download a copy of the Vagrantfile; ...