Logging Internet traffic with Azure
For monitoring network traffic within Azure, Microsoft provides a Traffic Analytics framework that allows you to capture aggregated logs of the network flows...
Posts by Year
2025
DIY Halloween effects- Burning Bones
I was looking to add a burning element to our Halloween decorations this year, and found some neat ideas for a pile of burning bones.
2022
Semi-random data with Ansible
You may come across the need for randomized data that is also predictable- whether picking randomized ports, UUIDs, etc. Ansible has a few tricks available t...
2021
Rundeck Integration with Ansible
Thanks to some integration plugins, Rundeck can serve as a competent GUI dashboard for running Ansible playbooks- but there are some quirks and caveats that ...
Ansible Exit Codes
This is more difficult to figure out than it should be.
Medeawiz Sprite Deep-Dive for Holiday Decorations
When preparing for the holidays, I’m a big fan of digital decorations- which use a projector and special videos to “decorate” a surface or create various spe...
Ansible job reports with Jinja + HTML
TLDR: If you need an Ansible playbook to generate a clean-looking HTML report of the tasks it performed, check out this template for some ideas.
Tracking deployment and maintenance activity in time series
We use a variety of tools to collect and visualize data about our infrastructure: Telegraf for data collection, InfluxDB for metrics storage, and Grafana for...
The XY Problem, or how to stay out of tech support purgatory
Have you ever been on the giving or receiving end of a marathon troubleshooting session? One that kept everyone going in circles for days, until someone fina...
Using Ansible to audit configuration drift in a brownfield environment
When adopting tool like Ansible for configuration management, one big challenge is that you are often starting in a brownfield environment- one that is alrea...
Creative abuse of vars_prompt, for user-friendly playbooks without Tower
Ansible’s CLI wizard: vars_prompt
2020
Disable the seek bar popup (OSD) in Kodi / OpenELEC / LibreELEC
Inspired by this forum post, and other fragmentary how-to’s floating around the internet.
2019
Using Grafana to make a web kiosk, with pictures from a network share or external site
Grafana has a playlist mode that lets you rotate through a series of dashboards. We set up a screen in our IT department, to show live stats for our web traf...
2017
Installing OpenELEC/LibreELEC on the Amlogic S905 Chipset
Amazon is now flooded with media boxes that use the Amlogic S905 or S905X chipsets. Typically they come with a custom build of Amlogic ’s reference OS, and t...
2015
Networker Jukebox Advanced Features- the fullest list
If you are in the middle of deploying EMC’s Networker backup suite, and you (still!) have to wrangle with a tape library, you may need to tune some “advanced...
Real-time script control and GUI interfaces in bash
While working on a script to batch-process items in parallel, I found the need to provide an interface that would let me control how the script was running, ...
Parallel Processing in Bash
So you need to perform a task or run a command across a medium-to-large number of hosts, in some kind of controlled fashion. The typical options are:
Cable Management for Home Wiring
Cable Management for Home Wiring
Modular Interactive Kickstart Madness pt. 2
This is Part 2. See Part 1 here. Previously, we covered using a combination of %include files and an interactive pre- script to make Kickstart more flexible...
Configuring new network hardware in RHEL6 and RHEL7
This is one of those things that seems obvious, until you actually need to do it.
Modular Interactive Kickstart Madness pt. 1
Kickstart is a great time-saver for making standard Linux builds, but the traditional Kickstart process grows brittle as you try to scale it out. You may fin...