A Busy Spring!
Between writing a book on Ansible , coaching volleyball at De Smet , preparing presentations for STL.JS and DrupalCon , andâlest I forget the most important responsibility of allâbeing a loving father and husband (see photo below!), I haven't had more than a minute to spare for writing for this blog, or processing some of the fun photos I've taken of ducks, deer, a fox, or feral cats running around our house!
Even with the bustle,
Drupal and Node.js at STLJS Meetup - Thursday, May 15!
In the presentation, I'll basically be covering how Server Check.in uses Drupal and Node.js to deliver a simple, fast, and stable server monitoring service. During the course of the presentation, I'll touch on why and how Server Check.in was built, how Ansible is used to maintain the
Diagnosing Disk I/O issues: swapping, high IO wait, congestion
One one small LEMP VPS I manage, I noticed munin graphs that showed anywhere between 5-50 MB/second of disk IO. Since the VM has an SSD instead of traditional spinning hard drive, performance wasn't too bad, but all that disk I/O definitely slowed things down.
I wanted to figure out what was the source of all the disk I/O, so I used the following techniques to narrow down the culprit (spoilers: it was MySQL, which was using some swap space
Drupal 8 - A Brief Introduction (DrupalCamp STL.14 Presentation)
I presented Drupal 8 - A Brief Introduction at DrupalCamp STL.14 on April 26, 2014.
Drupal 8 brings a lot of changes. Many standby contributed modules are now included with Drupal Core, and many small changes add up to the most exciting Drupal release yet! This presentation guides you through many of the biggest changes, highlighting how Drupal 8 will accelerate your web development and provide tools to make Drupal the best content management platform on any device.
View the slideshow below, or follow the
PHP: It doesn't have to be a bad experience
It gets a little bit under my skin when I see a link to PHP: A fractal of bad design posted in the comments on every article mentioning PHP on tech sites, blogs, and forums.
PHP developers get it: PHP is full of ugly warts, and is not perfect. Far from it.
The Easy Chicken - Backyard eggs in St. Louis, MO
My sister's family just started a new St. Louis-area business, The Easy Chicken , providing resources to those interested in raising chickens in an urban or suburban environment.
There are some potentially difficult and time-consuming aspects to keeping chickens in an urban environment: acquiring chickens, seeking permits or licenses from particular municipalities, finding a source for feed, coops, and other materials, and finding reliable information about keeping chickens healthy. The Easy Chicken's tagline is Backyard eggs made easy , and they have
A brief history of SSH and remote access
This post is an excerpt from Chapter 11: Server Security and Ansible , in Ansible for DevOps .
In the beginning, computers were the size of large conference rooms. A punch card reader would merrily accept pieces of paper that instructed the computer to do something, and then a printer would etch the results into another piece of paper. Thousands of mechanical parts worked harmoniously (when they did work) to compute relatively simple commands.
As time progressed, computers became somewhat smaller, and interactive terminals became more user-friendly
Sessions at DrupalCon and DrupalCamp
I mentioned this elsewhere (see: DrupalCon and DrupalCamp news ), but I'll post here as well; I'm going to be speaking at both DrupalCon Austin and DrupalCamp St. Louis this year!
I've submitted a few sessions to DrupalCon Austin in the past, mostly surrounding the Honeypot module for Drupal, but this year, a session I submitted in the DevOps track was chosen: DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory! . I figured since I'm writing a book on Ansible
DrupalCon and DrupalCamp news + free DrupalCon ticket!
This week, the DrupalCon Austin sessions have been posted , and I'm thrilled to have one of my session submissions (in the DevOps track) selected: DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory! .
The session will go over how Ansible can be used to realize faster, easier, and more successful Drupal deployments, as well as Ansible's ability to make sure that every environment is 'like production', so you don't ever have surprises when you deploy code to its final destination.
Building VM images with Ansible and Packer
TL;DR: Go grab the example packer-centos-65 project from GitHub, run $ packer build centos65.json , and you'll end up with a CentOS 6.5 Vagrant box file for VirtualBox. Modify to suit your needs.