Some updates from the GNOME Sysadmin Team
Posted on March 7, 2013
| Andrea Veri
It’s been more than a month now since I started looking into the many outstanding items we had waiting on our To Do list here at the GNOME Infrastructure. A lot has been done and a lot has yet to come during the next months, but I would like to share with you some of the things I managed to look at during these weeks.
As you may understand many Sysadmin’s tasks are not perceived at all by users especially the ones related to the so-called “Puppet-ization” which refers to the process of creating / modifying / improving our internal Puppet repository.
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IPv6 tunneling with Hurricane Electrics (HE)
Posted on December 21, 2012
| Andrea Veri
I’ve been looking around for a possible way to connect to the IPv6 internet for some time now and given the fact my provider didn’t allow me to run IPv6 natively I had to find an alternative solution. Hurricane Electrics (HE) provides (for free) five configurable IPv4-to-IPv6 tunnels together with a free DNS service and an interesting certification program.
Willing to test the latest revision of the Internet Protocol on your Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora machines?
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The future is Cloudy
Posted on December 13, 2012
| Andrea Veri
Have you ever heard someone talking extensively about Cloud Computing or generally Clouds? and have you ever noticed the fact many people (even the ones who present themselves as experts) don’t really understand what a Cloud is at all? That happened to me multiple times and one of the most common misunderstandings is many see the Cloud as something being on the internet. Many companies add a little logo representing a cloud on their frontpage and without a single change on their infrastructure (but surely with a price increment) they start calling their products as being on the Cloud.
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The Linux’s perception of my neighbours
Posted on November 22, 2012
| Andrea Veri
I live in a little village close to the city and one of the houses close to my property is for rent since more than ten years. A lot of families and people succeeded in that house and every time someone new joined my Linux evangelist hat jumped in my head.
I’ve always presented myself as a Linux geek to my neighbours and it has been nice seeing how the Linux word evolved (with funny and surprising quotes) during the past ten years in their minds.
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Report: FAD Milan 2012
Posted on November 3, 2012
| Andrea Veri
Exactly one week ago I was attending the Fedora Activity Dayorganized in Milan in concomitance with the Linux Day event being organized in several italian cities. Meeting the Fedora italian team has been simply great, we’ve been collaborating remotely since more than an year now and finding out all them being so friendly and pleasant has been a great pleasure.
Each of us presented a specific Fedora-related topic (I personally talked about Fedora and its Infrastructure, my presentation is publicly viewable at the following link) and I must admit everyone did an awesome job, we taught and learnt from each other at the same time and given the fact it was the very first time the team was put together, well, I can say our mission was accomplished.
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SSH Tunneling for VNC
Posted on October 6, 2012
| Andrea Veri
Logging in into a Linux machine and executing the hundreds commands available is just one of the most common usages of OpenSSH. Another interesting and very useful usage is tunneling some specific (or even all) traffic from your local machine to an external machine you have access to.
Today we’ll analyze how to access a certain virtual machine’s console by tunneling the relevant VNC port locally and accessing it through your favorite VNC client.
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FAD Milano 2012
Posted on September 19, 2012
| Andrea Veri
È con piacere che annuncio la mia presenza al Fedora Activity Day di Milano in data 27 Ottobre 2012 e con altrettanto piacere ringrazio gli organizzatori per avermi dedicato uno spazio di trenta minuti in cui discutere ed approfondire le tematiche derivanti dall’amministrazione di sistemi Linux, nello specifico, dell’amministrazione degli stessi computer che ospitano e rendono disponibili numerosi servizi alle migliaia di utenti Fedora che contribuiscono quotidianamente al progetto.
Ho partecipato fisicamente, purtroppo, a pochissimi eventi Open Source e per questo motivo sono particolarmente emozionato di aver la possibilità di prender parte ad una manifestazione così sentita ed apprezzata come il Linux Day, contesto in cui lo stesso Fedora Activity Day prenderà piede.
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Building Debian packages with Deb-o-Matic
Posted on September 17, 2012
| Andrea Veri
Today I’ll be telling you about an interesting way to build your Debian packages using Deb-o-Matic, a tool developed and maintained by Luca Falavigna. Some more details about this tool from the package’s description:
Deb-o-Matic is an easy to use build machine for Debian source packages based on pbuilder, written in Python.
It provides a simple tool to automate build of source packages with limited user interaction and a simple configuration.
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Manage your website through Git
Posted on September 15, 2012
| Andrea Veri
Ever wondered how you can update your website (in our case a static website with a bunch of HTML and PHP files) by committing to a Git repository hosted on a different server? if the answer to the previous question is yes, then you are in the right place.
The scenario:
Website hosted on server A.
Git repository hosted on server B.
and a few details about why would you opt for maintaining your website through Git:
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Nagios IRC Notifications
Posted on June 30, 2012
| Andrea Veri
Lately (as I earlier pointed out on my blog) I’ve been working on improving GNOME’s infrastructure monitoring services. After configuring XMPP it was time to find out a good way for sending out relevant notifications to our IRC channel hosted on GIMPNET. I achieved that with a nice combo: supybot + supybot-notify, all that mixed up with a few grains of Nagios command definitions.
But here we go with a little step-by-step guide:
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