Survival Guide to Linux Administration

Gradle is an open-source build automation tool focused on flexibility and performance. It has a mature offering of libraries,plugins, and testing. Gradle build scripts are written using a Groovy or Kotlin DSL. Although this post focuses on installation, I also wanted to provide some links for extra value: Plugins can be found @ https://plugins.gradle.org/ Netflix's Glisten is an ease of use Groovy library for building JVM applications with Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) check out https://github.com/Netflix/glisten Lastly, Gradle auto completion can be found @ https://github.com/gradle/gradle-completion Installing Gradle Version 5.3.1 yum makecache yum install unzip yum install bzip2 yum remove java yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk // Confirm Intalled correctly java -version wget https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-5.3.1-bin.zip -P /tmp/ mkdir /opt/gradle unzip -d /opt/gradle /tmp/gradle-5.3.1-bin.zip rm /tmp/gradle-5.3.1-bin.zip vim /etc/pro...

If you are a junior admin that works with Vmware or Azure, learning Veeam backups can elevate your skills and value. This post will walk through the steps of setting up the free Linux backup agent on a Centos 7 virtual machine. Step 1: Lay the Foundation https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforlinux/userguide/system_requirements.html?ver=30 https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforlinux/userguide/installation_process.html?ver=30#dep Run uname -r and take note of the kernel version. Make sure you yum install kernel-devel which matches your kernel version In order to install libudev dependency I used yum install systemd-devel For libfuse dependency I used yum install fuse-libs yum install syslinux yum install epel-release yum update -y or yum makecache yum install dkms (If you cant find this package check your epel realease) *Do Not Skip Dependencies* unless they do not apply to your operating system. Footnotes will guide you in the docu...

This is the first post in a series focusing on implementing a CI/CD pipeline. The reason we are starting with Git and Github is because you need to have your foundation of source control set before you can set up build tools or continuous integration tools. A few reflections I have gathered over the past weeks conducting research. First off, everyone working in IT Operations or Software Development needs to watch this video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc Sometimes learning about the past allows on to understand the present. As an example, when I first looked at Gradle I was extremely confused. However, when you trace back its genealogy to Apache Ant and then even further back to GNU Make, you can start to understand the landscape of the plethora of tools we have at our disposal in the present. You start to understand how tools have different wrappers around them and fundamentally what they are intended to do. If you are a new Systems Admin, I encourage you to c...

In order to set up your Base Channel you will need some gpg key information from the server. I used the following commands to acquire this information: [root@sw ~]# cd /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/ [root@sw rpm-gpg]# gpg --with-fingerprint RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7 In order to set up the repository for the base channel I used: http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/7.6.1810/os/x86_64/ Lastly, trying to sync repositories and packages can be extremely taxing on system resources; especially if done via the web GUI. I think this is because it also kicks off some java process as well as the sync. As a work around, close the web GUI completely, and use the following command via CLI: spacewalk-repo-sync -c Insert-Channel-Label Overall I would prefer leaner server provisioning software. My future projects will have less to do with deployments and have more focus on web operations. List of future interest: Nginx Haproxy Varnish Python Jenkins

Spacewalk server is deployed and functional. 😎 Some general tips are add the hostname and Ip to the /etc/hosts file on your Virtualization host machine. I also wanted to access my Spacewalk GUI via web browser on my Windows Desktop; since installing a web browser on your server is counter intuitive. In order to accomplish this both machines have to be on the same network and you can edit your host file in Windows using notepad. Run as Admin and add your VM to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts .  Spinning up the VM: I used 2 Vcpu cores and 3 GiB of RAM. I allocated 50 GiB of storage. I would say these are a minimum to deploy this server. When installing the OS for your Spacewalk server, keep in mind it is essentially a database server. I used the following custom partitioning to accomplish a successful deployment because postgresql needs at least 15 GiB of space.    Follow the install process found on Github: https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/w...

I intended to make Ovirt Node work since it is based off of Centos but within 10 minutes of install I am having to vim /etc/hosts and set Ip address to hostnames because I need to bypass FQDN requirements. Then I need to set up the Ovirt Engine which requires a lot of resources. I still do not know what purposes it serves. An hour later and I still have not spun up a VM. At this point I am starting to think I shouldn't use this platform. I scrapped Ovirt and spun up a Proxmox host. I will add a big tip here. Login to your router when during the Proxmox install and reserve the IP it is using. This will effectively bind that private Ip to the MAC address of the Proxmox host. This step is super important. Once you are done installing Proxmox all the network configurations are done for you automatically. You do not have to set up a bridge between host and Vms. I was able to install Proxmox and spin up a Vm in about 15 minutes with full network connectivity. The GUI also looks ver...