Ansible Galaxy: Install private roles from private GitHub repositories

When I googled how to install private roles using ansible-galaxy, I found suggestions such as, “use git+https://github.com/…” or even better, “I am not sure what you’re doing, but it works for me (since Ansible 2.2)”. So, since neither of these suggestions helped me and because I am unable to find documentation with obvious examples, here is how you achieve this. Assuming you have your ssh key and configuration figured out, put this into requirements....

June 30, 2020 · 1 min

Ubuntu: setting up redis-server (reloaded)

I blogged about setting up redis before, here’s a small update to the situation: If you’re running Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04.x, the most recent release available through aptitude is 1.x. Version 1.x doesn’t include many things (pubsub, etc.) which are available in 2.x. So this leaves you with two options! Compile! Compiling redis-server is simple (aka, make && sudo make install), a few things were missing (last time I checked):...

November 28, 2011 · 2 min

Trying out BigCouch with Chef-Solo and Vagrant

So the other day, I wanted to quickly check something in BigCouch and thanks to Vagrant, chef(-solo) and a couple cookbooks — courtesy of Cloudant — this was exceptionally easy. As a matter of fact, I had BigCouch running and setup within literally minutes. Here’s how. Requirements You’ll need git, Ruby, gems and Vagrant (along with Virtualbox) installed. If you need help with those items, I suggest you check out my previous blog post called Getting the most out of Chef with Scalarium and vagrant....

April 4, 2011 · 1 min

Giganews VPN on Ubuntu

This article briefly describes how you can setup the Giganews VPN (PPTP) on Ubuntu. I’m gonna assume 10.04 (that’s what I tested with) and the gnome desktop. Does this sound familiar: The VPN connection ‘xxxxx’ failed because there were no valid VPN secrets. If so then I’m hoping this article will help you. What is a VPN for? The use-case for a VPN — and this is for basically any VPN (not just Giganews’ service) — is security....

February 20, 2011 · 1 min

Zend Framework: Writing an IN-Clause with Zend_Db

I’m currently running a little database analysis to see how many of our users might be affected by Gawker’s breach of security the other week. Since we use Zend Framework, Zend_Db is our weapon of choice. Running the queries I noticed, that Zend_Db doesn’t seem to support an IN-clause with a straight fetchAll(). The IN-clause is only supported when I wrap my statement with Zend_Db_Select, which is something I rarely do....

December 19, 2010 · 2 min