Posts
Recent GitHub Projects
I’ve been doing work in Golang and writing some things for Kubernetes that I haven’t indexed here. See my projects for details.
New Publishing Workflow
This site now has a new publishing workflow. Hopefully this will reduce friction and encourage me to write more.
Second System Effect Impacts Traefik
Traefik has changed everything, breaking TLS for this site. I’m not a fan of the redesign.
Runbook Framework
A new a shell framework to construct manual and automated runbooks
Principles Of Design
A list of my pithy statements about designing systems. Eventually I’ll write explanations here.
2021 Site Refresh
I’ve refreshed the site for 2021 using Jekyll
Markdown Toc
Introducing Markdown Tables of Contents.
Gnarly Sed
Last night I wrote a script to compute a Table of Contents for Markdown documents and insert it into the document. It handles both syntaxes for heading block...
Computer Architect
Something that often surprises people about a Software Architect1 role: it’s a people job. same can be said about my current “Cloud Systems ...
Resetting a git-crypt system
The Problem
The 2nd Crypto Wars
This has been invisible to most people, but we’re now in what I call the “2nd Crypto Wars”. This is important, and your world will be impacted by it.
Staying Sane with IaC
Infrastructure as Code is all the rage, but suffers the same problems as any other code: it can easily become an unmanageable plate of spaghetti.
Google Next: Networking
Google thinks about networking in a way that is truly revolutionary.
Terraform Workspaces vs SCM Branches
TL;DR: Workspaces and branches serve different purposes. An SCM branch is an alternet set of code. A Terraform workspace is an alternate location to apply...
Feeling Scrummy?
Description of a successfully implemented, fairly light-weight SCRUM process.
Guidelines for Modern DevOps
A list of guidelines for good DevOps, presented in the spirit of Shuhari Write your success criteria first. That way you know when you’re done. If you can’...
Herding cats in the Cloud
I gave my “Herding Cats…” talk at the 2017 New England VTUG Winter Warmer.
Project: Makessl
Makessl is a Makefile for GNU make that assists you in generating SSL keys, certificate requests, and (optionally) certificates.
Simple S3 Backup script
Announcing availability of a simple program to backup the output of commands to Amazon S3 storage.
Sane branch naming conventions in GIT
The Problem: The state of the branch
Thoughts on running software
I’m partially on operations guy, so, net result, I’m responsible making software run. What exactly does this mean?
Introducing docker-xymon
In short: build and deploy this for instant monitoring. Seeing no viable containerization of the Xymon monitoring system (and the ‘net is large – I could h...
Changing Username on technical social sites
I’m getting into Docker, and have recently registered “deweysasser” as my docker hub username. Neither my Github username nor my Twitter handle match this, ...
Notes and Summary from DevOps Days Boston 2014
These are my notes from DevOps Days Boston in 2014. See the section entitled “Dewey’s Summary” for, well, just that. The rest is pretty much raw notes. I’...
GIT for SVN users: An introduction
This is part of a series of posts about GIT for people with an SVN background. If you’re an experienced GIT user, my series of “GIT for SVN users” is likel...
GIT for SVN users: A simple Github workflow with multiple repositories
This is one article in my series on GIT for SVN users. See the introduction.
An objective difference in consumer disk drives
I’ve finally found an objective (and quantifiable) difference in consumer hard drives.
VM Resources Page
I’m now a VM management and performance guy for a large amount of my life.
Laptop for Virtualization
This is a bit more specific than I usually get but I want to document what’s working for me.
The problem with GIT
After a few months of using GIT, I realized one of my fundamental problems with git:
Windows vs. Linux from an I/O perspective
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out an SSD storage array.
A most excellent backplane
A brief review of a SATA backplane
Tool of the Month: Puppet
Puppet is a tool for configuring a large number of machines by recipe and periodically checking that they are still in conformance. I have fallen in love.
LVM2 and Linux boot delays
In which I learn that sufficient logical volumes and/or snapshots can make a default Ubuntu Server installation unbootable, but there’s a very simple fix.
FireFox Scrapbook Extension
This week’s tool: the Scrap Book extensionfor FireFox.
Quintensential Media Player (QMP)
QMP media player/ripper/library for Windows
RXVT
This week’s tool: RXVT
Joel On Changes
Joel Spolsky wrote in "Choices = Headaches" in which he ranted (quite validly) for a while about the Windows Vista shutdown button. The problem is ...
Automount Snapshot
Summary: I present a method for transparently auto-creating lvm snapshots on use.
Raw Code
“Raw Code”, Lyrics by Dewey Sasser , with apologies to Dimitri Piomkin