Probably

A model for writing Puppet Modules

Mark — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:14:45 +0000

There are too many Puppet Modules out there that suck, says Tim Sharpe. I think he may have a point actually. Writing decent Puppet modules isn’t something that occurs naturally – it’s pretty easy to write a module that does …

Perl WWW::Mechanize test fails – odd address for HTML::Daemon->new(LocalAddr =>)

Mark — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:23:22 +0000

This has me scratching my head. UPDATE: I can explain it! It’s Apple braindeadedness. It would appear that something changed with Lion, maybe even as recent as 10.7.2 Host lookups go to DNS first, then to /etc/hosts. And it would …

Puppet 2.7.9 & Facter 1.6.4 released at OpenCSW

Mark — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:14:19 +0000

I’ve ramped Puppet and Facter to be the latest versions at OpenCSW. Puppet is now at 2.7.9 and Facter at 1.6.4 in the ‘unstable’ (most recent packages) catalog.

OS X Lion Mail app corrupts attachments

Mark — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:13:41 +0000

I’ve had the Mail app on OS X Lion crash a few times on me lately. No idea why. But at the same time I seem to have been experiencing a lot of corrupt attachments. One PDF came through part …

Creating VMware ESXi virtuals using the Perl SDK

Mark — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:42:59 +0000

I’ve been tinkering with the Perl SDK for VMware this last week. I wanted to create a virtual from the command line using the shipped ‘vmcreate.pl’ script – but the ‘datacenter’ variable it insists be there doesn’t appear anywhere in …

VMware Perl SDK error “Server version unavailable..”

Mark — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:07:02 +0000

Whilst working with the VMware Perl SDK this morning I came across this error: Server version unavailable at ‘https://hostname:443/sdk/vimService.wsdl‘ at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/VMware/VICommon.pm line 545. Turns out it can’t verify the server’s SSL certificate. export PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 in your shell before using a …

The Puppet Cookbook is out

Mark — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:52:43 +0000

John Arundel‘s excellent Puppet Cookbook has finally been released. I’m only slightly biased by the fact I was the technical reviewer ;-)

Is Perl a legacy language?

Mark — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 07:33:27 +0000

I’m rather fond of Perl. Why you’d consider it legacy, I don’t know. Probably because of the trendy languages like Ruby and Python. It’s true Perl code can end up looking like a dog’s dinner, but it doesn’t have to. …

Setting up sudoers with Puppet and Augeas

Mark — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:40:18 +0000

Since Augeas became available within Puppet it’s been considerably easier to do inline edits of configuration files – providing there’s a lens, of course. However, I find the syntax of Augeas less than friendly, and battled for a while to …

Errors exporting Keynote presentations to PowerPoint

Mark — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:00:11 +0000

I generally write any presentations I do in Keynote. I’m not a fan of Microsoft Office at the best of times – it’s awful in Windows and not a lot better on the Mac (my chosen desktop platform). Mostly I’ll …