In the middle of 2017 We decided it was time to look at our options for WAN connectivity as our current 3 year contract was ending in January. We began by meeting with Shamrock Consulting to discuss our needs and determine our requirements.
So it’s been about two years since my last blog post. My new years resolution is to start blogging again about the different technologies and software I’m using in my current role. I am now a Systems Administrator at a Post Production house where my responsibilities include Networking, VMware, Information Security, VoIP, and anything else that comes up. The first big project coming up this in just a few weeks is one that I’m really excited about.
My first post of 2016 is going to be a quick overview of how to use Data Containers and back them up. Getting Started Most of you are probably using a line such as -v /local/path/on/server:/var/lib/postgresql/data to store your data persistently. There is nothing wrong with this but I discovered when I needed to migrate everything from one docker server to another it was problematic so I learned about using Data Containers to store my data.
Just wanted to get a quick post up with some examples for your Core Repository. This is based on code extracted from my current Puppet Environment and I will continue to add to it as I refactor my Puppetserver early next year. There are notes in the README file inside of the repository providing an overview of what is included. Feel free to contribute with pull requests if you have an examples you wish to share.
So I figured I could at least squeeze one more post in this year even though it’s a little off topic from my Mac Management Series. I was tasked a few weeks ago with purchasing and deploying 10 tablets for use during our Regular weekend services as well as for Special Events. My desire was to have a setup that was easy to manage and have the tablets automatically Reset/Restore themselves to a preset configuration every time they are plugged back in.
Configuration Overview So this is the second post about Puppet. I’m going to go through a brief overview deploying some configuration to your computer using Puppet. If you don’t already have Puppetserver running, please go back to my previous post Here to get up and running with Puppet. If you aren’t following from my previous post some of this will be different depending on your Environment but I will be continuing with the setup on the Docker Image that I’ve created.
Just a quick post here. I’ve spent some time redesigning the website on Hugo because of some issues I was having with Octopress on my machine. Still working on a few small items, but if you find any issues hit me up on the MacAdmins Slack! Thanks!
Back at the Church IT Roundtable in October I began sharing about how we have implemented a Mac Management solution using Open Source Tools and I promised to provide tutorials on how to get started. I’ve spent the time rebuilding the Docker Container to automate the setup of a new Puppet Server because of some issues that my original container experiences on occasion. This post is going to cover the basics of getting Docker & Puppet up and running on a Ubuntu 14.
“In the beginning God created…” the Mac… “and it was good”
Ok maybe I went a little far in that one. I came on staff at Real Life Church in 2012 and at that time we were mostly a PC shop with the exception being Pastors exclusively having a Mac (With Local Admin Access and no admin account for IT). Over the next 2 years we realized that we got significantly more support requests on our PCs than for our Macs. We were running on an aging SBS 2008 server that was maxed out on licensing and we were continuing to grow. After numerous conversations with my Director and leadership the decision was clear that we needed to make the transition to a 100% Mac shop in our church.
After a few days in production I discovered that over time the Pi’s would lose connection to the RTSP feeds. The only two ways to resolve this were to reboot the Pi or SSH into the Pi. Because of this I started back at the beginning and was able to develop another way of running this matrix that would automatically reload the RTSP feed if it was lost. The initial Pi Setup instructions are identical to my last post, Raspberry Pi Camera Matrix, the differences come in with setting up the new code base.
For those that are interested in how to make this happen here’s the instructions and code:
What you’ll need: