Rocky Linux and Packer

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/: Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project has been announced, developed and then released. The project describes itself as follows:...

August 28, 2021 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick

Tracking costs in Terraform using Infracost

In my last blog post I introduced a stage which executed Checkov to my Terraform Azure DevOps pipeline, this scanned the Terraform configuration and stopped the deployment if there was an issue. I also added a stage which checks to see if there are any resources being destroyed. Whats missing? Both of these I thought should give some basic protection against problems caused by common configuration issues, which they did, but it didn’t take into account the end user, i....

August 24, 2021 · 14 min · Russ Mckendrick

Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline with Checkov & Approvals

It’s been just over a year since I first posted about the Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline I used to use, I say used to use, because that pipeline is now a little outdated. This posts covers the updated Pipeline I am starting to deploy along side my Terraform code. Pipeline Overview The pipeline itself has expanded a little and it now not only uses stages but also depending what Terraform is planning on doing it will trigger a manual approval process should there be any resources being destroyed....

June 8, 2021 · 13 min · Russ Mckendrick

Azure DevOps Multi-Stage Pipelines

As I move into using Azure DevOps more and more, there is one thing which I really haven’t got on with and that is release pipelines. I didn’t like that I couldn’t easily define it as YAML like I could with build pipelines, even though I don’t like them, there are a few things I do like — like approval gates. Environments Luckily, there are ways to get around this — the most simple way is to add an Environment and then add an Approval....

April 25, 2021 · 7 min · Russ Mckendrick

Top 20ish Records of 2020

A little late, but there are my top 20 records of 2020, as per previous years these are all ones which I have purchased on vinyl. bdrmm ‎- Bedroom Doves ‎- The Universal Want Pure Reason Revolution — Eupnea Orb — Abolition Of The Royal Familia The Smashing Pumpkins — Cyr Andy Bell — The View From Halfway Down Ulver — Flowers Of Evil Church Of The Cosmic Skull — Everybodys Going To Die Jim Bob — Pop Up Jim Bob Matt Berry — Phantom Bird Working Mens Club — Working Mens Club Crippled Black Phoenix — Ellengast Bruce Springsteen — Letter To You And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead — X: The Godless Void And Othe Stories The Pineapple Thief — Versions Of The Truth Ozric Tentacles — Space For The Earth Abel Ganz — The Life Of The Honeybee Other Moments Of Clarity Sparks — A Steady Drip Drip Drip EOB — Earth Badly Drawn Boy — Banana Skin Shoes Katatonia — City Burials Kavus Torabi — Hip To The Jag

January 22, 2021 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

Managing Python on macOS Big Sur

When Apple releases a new version of macOS it always takes a few months for everything to catchup, following my last blog post where I mentioned that I was having problems installing Python on macOS Big Surwhich meant that my preferred method of installing and managing Python using pyenv, which is documented in this blog post, didn’t work out of the box — and the workarounds suggested workarounds on GitHub made my shell really slow....

January 10, 2021 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick

Ansible, Azure and macOS Big Sur

One of the annoying things about updating to the latest version of macOS is that a lot of the command-line tools I use tend to break or need tweaking slightly from how I have been using them. One of the annoyances in the move to Big Sur is that Python is a back to being a massive pain, and more so than normal. At the time of writing pyenv is not running all that well, and while there are fixes available they slow down my shell — for more information on the problem see this GitHub issue and for information on why pyenv see my previous post on updating Python on macOS....

December 28, 2020 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick

Migrating my Docker images to the GitHub Container Registry

A few weeks after the final draft of the fourth edition of Mastering Docker was submitted Docker made the announcement that they would be making changes to the retention of images in Docker Hub as well as the introduction of rate limits. These changes make complete sense given that at the time of writing this post there are over 150 million images taking up over 15 PB of storage, of that 10 PB of the images haven’t been accessed in over 6 months and 4....

September 27, 2020 · 7 min · Russ Mckendrick