Show Date: Thursday, 20 December 2012
In this episode, we discuss Ops School and training System Administrators. The episode was recorded as a Google+ Hangout and steamed live on YouTube.
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- Video
- Panel
- What’s Cookin’
- In the News
- Meet Up Groups
- Cookbook News
- Outline
- Picks
- Download
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Panel
- Avleen Vig github, twitter, blog
- Patrick McDonnell, Senior Web Operations Engineer at Etsy twitter
- Carolyn Rowland twitter
- Mike Fiedler github, twitter
- Bryan Berry github, twitter, irc: bryanwb, blog: devopsanywhere
- Nathen Harvey github, twitter, irc: nathenharvey, blog
In the News
- In episode 23, we talked about OmniOS, the Illumos-based OS from OmniTI. There’s now an OmniOS AMI available on Amazon’s EC2.
- knife-solo_data_bag v 0.3.0 was recently released. This release adds support for encrypted_data_bag_secret.
- Joshua Timberman recently refactored his Chef repository to take advantage of Berkshelf. He wrote up the process on his blog.
- Igor Afonov recently gave a presentation about Application deployment with Chef. The slides are available on speakerdeck.
- Matt Urbanski recently wrote up a blog post titled Chef Testing Strategies Compared. In this post, Matt looks at minitest, chefspec, cucumber chef, test-kitchen, whyrun, foodcritic, knife, chef-solo, and strainer. Definitely worth a read!
- If you’re listening to this show, chances are good that you believe DevOps Matters. But what if you need a little help convincing the Developers on your team that DevOps matters to them? Check out a recent blog post from Benjamin Wooton - Why DevOps Matters (To Developers)…
- Speaking of DevOps, the Cool Geeks DevOps meetup group met recently to talk about Using Opscode Chef in an Enterprise to Pivot to DevOps. Jeff Padgett’s slides are available on the meetup site.
- Are you using Chef on Windows? Do you want to? We’ve got a couple of blog posts for you from John Bennett - Getting Started with Opscode Chef (on Windows), part 1 and part 2.
- Doug Ireton also has some Chef on Windows goodness for us - he recently blogged about How to Include the Windows Cookbook Helper Methods in Your Chef Recipes.
- vagrant-butcher is a new gem that aims to streamline you Chef and Vagrant workflow. If you’re using Vagrant with the Chef-Client provisioner, e.g. for creating cookbooks, it creates a client and a node on the Chef server. Once you destroy the VM, both the client and node will be kept on the server, which may cause problems if you fire up the same VM again. This gem attempts to correct that.
- Cookbook versioning is a hot-topic. After a cookbook has been initially developed and put into use, any changes should be accompanied by an appropriate change to its version when those changes are published. But just what defines an “appropriate change” to a cookbook’s version? Mike Fiedler and Kevin Christen have released a Cookbook Versioning Policy document. Email feedback directly to Mike and Kevin.
Upcoming Meetup Groups
Meetup with people in your neighborhood at one of the following meetup groups.
- The Bay Area Chef User Group will hold another Chef Cafe on January 3rd.
- The Los Angeles Chef Users Group will meet on February 4th.
- DevOps DC will meet on January 8th.
- DevOps Minneapolis will meet on January 9th.
- [The Chicago Chef User
- Group](http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Chef-User-Group/events/95348762/) will hold another Chef Cafe on January 10th.
- LakeMary DevOps, in Lake Mary, Florida will hold their first meeting on January 14th.
- The Opscode Chef Meetup group will host their first meeutp at Opscode’s Seattle Headquarters office on January 15th.
- The Infrastructure Coders group in Melbourne, Australia will meet on January 15th.
Cookbook News
Did you know, there are now more than 700 cookbooks available on the community site?!
New Cookbooks
- chef-inotify - A Proof of concept cookbook that implements inotify awareness in chef file/template/cookbook_file resources.
- ruby-cookbook - A wrapper cookbook from Mathias Lafeldt that installs Ruby using the cookbooks rbenv and ruby_build by Fletcher Nichol.
- enforce_supported_platform v1.0.0 - jtimberman Installs/Configures enforce_supported_platform
- Appfirst-Cookbook v1.0.2 - appfirst Configures an appfirst collector for a given account id. This will also set up a LWRP for creating Nagios checks via Appfirst.
- pypi-mirror v0.0.5 - kelfish Installs and configures a PyPi mirror server to be used as either a public or private mirror.
- psql v0.1.0 - peter_donald A set of LWRPs for interacting with postgres using the CLI.
- prosody v0.1.0 - computerlyrik Installs/Configures prosody, a lightweight, open source Jabber server.
- postgis v0.2.0 - peter_donald Installs/Configures postgis Postgresql extension
- plexapp v0.1.0 - jtimberman Installs and configures Plex media server
- phpunit v0.0.2 - devesc Installs/Configures phpunit
- nyan-cat v0.1.4 - someara The nyan-cat cookbook configures a node to use Andrea Campi’s nyan-cat-chef-formatter by default when running chef-client.
- nats v1.0.0 - andreacampi Installs and configures a Nats server for use with CloudFoundry.
- motion v0.1.0 - alno Installs Motion, a software motion detector.
- monit_bin v0.2.1 - sawanoboly Installs/Configures monit_bin
- mongodb-10gen v0.1.4 - sawanoboly Installs/Configures mongodb-10gen
- liquid-feedback v0.8.0 - computerlyrik Set up liquid feedback system
- libyaml v0.1.0 - cassianoleal Installs/Configures libyaml
- hwraid v0.1.4 - sawanoboly Installs/Configures hwraid from hwraid.le-vert.net
- gitorious v1.0.0 - brugidou Installs/Configures gitorious
- gitolite-server v1.0.1 - pboers1988 Installs/Configures gitolite
- ff_sync v1.0.0 - computerlyrik Installs and configures firefox mozilla sync server
- elasticsearch v0.1.0 - chrisroberts Installs/Configures elasticsearch
- cutlery v0.1.0 - peter_donald Cutlery is a cookbook containing a collection useful library code.
- cpan-plus v0.0.2 - melezhik wrapper for cpanplus installer
- cloudfoundry v1.0.1 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry
- cloudfoundry-stager v1.0.0 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry-stager
- cloudfoundry-ruby-runtime v1.1.0 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry-ruby-runtime
- cloudfoundry-router v1.0.0 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry-router
- cloudfoundry-cloud_controller v1.1.0 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry-cloud_controller
- cloudfoundry-nginx v1.0.2 - andreacampi Installs and configures nginx for CloudFoundry
- cloudfoundry-health_manager v1.0.0 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry-health_manager
- cloudfoundry-dea v1.0.0 - andreacampi Installs/Configures cloudfoundry-dea
- chef-client_syslog v0.1.0 - sawanoboly Send chef-client log to syslog.
- bacula v1.0.0 - computerlyrik Installs and autoconfigures bacula backup system
- base v0.1.0 - alno Configures basic server parameters: hostname, timezone, kernel modules.
- bind9-easy v0.0.1 - computerlyrik Installs and autoconfigures bind9 nameserver
- zarafa v1.1.0 - computerlyrik Setup Zarafa to - sync your Android/i/Windows Phone (ActiveSync) - have eMail push - receive and send emails via imap - Webinterface to manage all
- sparkleshare v0.5.0 - computerlyrik Configures sparkleshare and configures/installs dashboard http client
- ucs-pxe v0.0.1 - mraju Builds a PXE appliance for Cisco UCS bare-metal deployment. This cookbook acts as the stage 2 phase for DC Automation. As of now, the recipes are tied specifically towards the workflow defined by ucs or ucs-solo cookbooks.
- vertx v1.0.0 - rgahagan Setup Vert.x, an event driven application framework that runs on the JVM
- vifm v1.0.0 - gregf Installs vifm file manager.
- Appfirst-Cookbook v1.0.2 - timsgreen Installs/Configures appfirst collector
Updated Cookbooks
- ad-auth v1.0.5 - tas50
- annoyances v0.2.0 - mray
- artifact v0.11.5 - reset
- beanstalkd v0.1.0 - devesc
- composer v0.0.2 - devesc
- dbench v1.0.2 - atomic-penguin
- diamond_lwrp v0.1.3 - scottmlikens
- exim4-light v0.1.0 - thomas_massmann
- filezilla v1.0.0 - tas50
- firefox v1.0.5 - tas50
- fusioninventory-agent v0.1.2 - ashmere
- gelf_handler v1.0.4 - peter_donald
- glassfish v0.5.18 - peter_donald
- hp-tools v0.3.0 - tas50
- known_host v0.1.3 - sethvargo
- librato_metrics v0.3.0 - portertech
- line v0.1.2 - someara
- newrelic v0.4.1 - devesc
- nexus v0.17.0 - reset
- nfs v0.3.0 - atomic-penguin
- nginx_conf v0.0.5 - phoolish
- nginx-fastcgi v0.0.11 - melezhik
- php-fpm v0.3.0 - wik
- recognizer v0.0.6 - portertech
- repos v0.0.2 - realloc
- riak v1.2.1 - cheeseplus
- sensu v0.2.0 - portertech
- smf v0.6.7 - bixu
- storm v1.0.28 - tas50
- yumrepo v0.16.5 - atomic-penguin
- virtualbox v0.7.2 - peplin
- texlive v0.2.0 - tk0miya
- zeoserver v0.1.1 - thomas_massmann
Outline/Questions
The State of Ops Education
- What is the current state of Ops education?
- Why does it need to change?
- Are there any Systems Administration related degree programs?
OpsSchool
- What is OpsSchool?
- What got you interested in starting OpsSchool?
- Why do we need an OpsSchool?
- How can I contribute?
- How can I attend?
- What problem solving techniques should ops people use? How do we train on those?
- How about “soft skills”? Communication, leadership, critical thinking. How do we teach those?
- How important is statistical reasoning? How do we teach that?
- You gave a workshop at LISA. How did that go? What feedback did you get?
Picks
Avleen
Patrick
Carolyn
Bryan
Mike
Nathen
Download
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- Download the Audio file