Forem: Bak3y

When your day could have gone better

Bak3y — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 23:25:27 +0000

It's the Little Things

Bak3y — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 19:20:24 +0000

Got a cool welcome gift from Shipt, where I start work on Monday. Excited to get to work over there!

Automating New OSX Setup #1.5 - A curveball

Bak3y — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 15:21:35 +0000

Up until now, I've been using BASH as my default shell in OSX, and just learned today that with the next version of MacOS, Apple is changing the default shell to zsh.

This is going to mean porting my stuff from BashIt over to Oh-My-Zsh and also porting over everything in my dotfiles.

Anybody have any advice on moving to zsh?

EDIT -

I'm now second-guessing switching to zsh? Why? Basically every system I'd ever connect to is going to have bash as it's default shell. Maybe I'd be better off grabbing the latest bash release and installing it myself.

Automating New OSX Setup #1 - What?

Bak3y — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 19:18:25 +0000

As part of moving to a new job, I'm going to end up with a new Macbook Pro. As such I'm going to have a super clean slate to start with and I'd like to tackle a goal of mine I've had for a while - a fully automated system configuration.

Logically step 1 here seems to be the What question: What am I going to try to cover here? I've come up with a short list that makes sense to me:

Restore keypair from TimeMachine backup
Install Python3 and pip
pip install Ansible

Now that I have a basis for automation, I'd like to do the rest via ansible playbook if possible:

install Homebrew
Setup various OS preferences (iCloud login, trackpad, dock, display, etc)
install Firefox
sign into Firefox
install VSCode
setup dotfiles (should just be a git pull)
install/configure BashIt
install/configure Go
setup extensions for VSCode (python, Go, Ansible)
setup AWS CLI (boto3, botocore)
configure AWS CLI

Now's where you guys come in. What am I forgetting here?

Deterministic Ansible

Bak3y — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 16:17:31 +0000

Recently I had to deploy AppDynamics agents out to some systems that ran both tomcat and JBOSS workloads, and here's how I used one playbook to rule them all.

1 - Figure out which platform I was dealing with

#check to see if we're tomcat or jboss
- name: Check to see if tomcat user exists
  stat:
    path: /home/tomcat8
  register: tomcat8

- name: check to see if jbossadm user exists
  stat:
    path: /home/jbossadm
  register: jbossadm

As you can see, I'm doing a simple stat module check on the home directory of the user running the java workload here. In our use case those 2 users would never coexist on a server.

2 - Swap ownership on files/folders based on our findings above

#creates directory path
- name: Create the directories for site specific configurations owned by tomcat8
  file:
    path: /usr/local/appdynamics/appagent/
    state: directory
    owner: tomcat8
    group: tomcat8
    mode: 0755
  when: tomcat8.stat.exists

- name: Create the directories for site specific configurations owned by jbossadm
  file:
    path: /usr/local/appdynamics/appagent/
    state: directory
    owner: jbossadm
    group: jbossadm
    mode: 0755
  when: jbossadm.stat.exists

So, in each case we're creating the same folder path and changing linux file system ownership based on which platform we're running this ansible playbook on.

The stat module and when conditions are pretty powerful tools you can use to make Ansible super flexible without having to pass a bunch of extra parameters in to control which tasks get executed in your playbooks.