Recently a hard drive went out on my main home VM Server. It was in a RAID, so there was no data loss. But as I had to shut everything down to replace hardware (no hot swap…), it makes me think about also maintaining the software stack for the lab.
Currently I have two physical systems that are libvirt/KVM hosts for my virtual machines, including the main firewall and fileserver. I’ve had my eye on a few newer technologies, so the lab layout requires maximum flexibility.
I’m fairly fond of Ansible as a light-weight configuration management tool, but I am always on the lookout for additionally tooling that will make it a bit easier to manage centrally…well, without paying for Ansible tower. I came across Ansijet and was pretty exciting. It provides a REST API to Ansible itself, as well as storing results in MongoDB. I still need to try this out, but seems very promising.
During some spare train time, I decided to begin transitioning my blog over to Jeykll! Why? My original blog/wiki was build around Dokuwiki. I liked the idea of having the core data in text format, and not in a database that would be tied to a specific version of whatever blogging software I happened to be using. While dokuwiki has served it’s purpose, it’s not primarily a blogging platform, and I worry about the long-term maintenance of the Dokuwiki codebase.
I’m still compiling my large list of tasks, and hope to break them out blog posts/wiki documents. But the coolest thing I’ve come across so far is that the Chromebook can open up Rar files! Rar compressed files are not too common, but nice to know it’s one less item I’ll have to depend on another machine to perform.
Due to the alignment of some stars financially, I went out and obtained a Chromebook for practically free! Specifically I am getting a Toshiba Chromebook 2. Although I tend to lean more toward open source OSes and non-cloud services, I want to explore the feasibility of actually using a lightweight laptop for regular purposes. Specifically I will be focusing around three use cases:
Normal End User Tasks. Sysadmin Tasks. Development Tasks.