Survival Guide to Linux Administration

Happy Good Friday! Here is some useful links for a relaxing weekend. My advice would be to download the VMs as soon as possible even if you do not plan on doing a deep dive immediately on the subject. Download the Puppet Learning VM: https://puppet.com/download-learning-vm How to set up the Puppet Learning VM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0nsM4uG9pQ&feature=youtu.be So You Think You Are Ready For The RHCSA Exam?: (This resource has been incredibly enjoyable and useful. The link to download the OVA is in the body of the post. You may need to use Firefox since Chrome forces https.) https://blog.fpmurphy.com/2016/09/so-you-think-you-are-ready-for-the-rhcsa-exam.html GNU Debugger: SREcon16 - The Realities of the Job of Delivering Reliability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4RwlOdppg&list=PLbRoZ5Rrl5lflZ8xrdFAT4BT36y_ycnyx Brendan D. Gregg Blog: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-08-09/gdb-example-ncurses.html Chef: https://learn.chef.io/#/ Ops...

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