For me, running containers is somewhat bound to the command line. Yet, having a graphical environment allows discovering of dependencies and errors in a more intuitive way. Fortunately, we can check our Kubernetes, Distrobox and Podman containers with these nifty GTK applications, too.
And here is the second article about somebody who really deserves it. I am talking about Ethan Sholly, the creator of selfh.st. Oh, you don't know him? If you are into self-hosting and home networks, you really should.
Many of you requested more articles about self-hosting and home servers. One of the major use cases is making files available for others in the network. This might be useful to share projects, but also for backups or filling your media library.
You might have seen these displays where a video is played endlessly, an ad is shown on repeat or some useful data is made available for everybody. Or, have you used an ATM, a library PC or an info terminal? All of these are considered Kiosk solutions.
Just last week, Fedora 40 was released. I upgraded my Silverblue Workstation already. Let's see what's new in Fedora, what changed, and how the Fedora ecosystem is becoming even better with this new release.
Last week, we installed AWX. It is one of the Open Source upstream developments for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. In the second part of this article, we will explore the UI and add our first workload to AWX.
So, you wrote your first playbooks, played with collections and command line tools, and you consider to have a UI for Ansible?
Portainer is an application, providing a web UI for management of Docker and Kubernetes. It is simple, yet powerful, and easy to use. But, what about Portainer on Podman? In this article, I will give a quick guide, how you can get it running and start your first containers.
I am in the middle of setting up my home lab, but also working on a project, named beby.cloud. In both cases, I want to do the initial setup automatically on a Raspberry Pi system. Fortunately, AlmaLinux OS supports Cloud-Init, so we can handle this easily.
Lot's has changed since my last articles about Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. This is not your typical "Rocky vs. Alma" article. Instead, I want to give my take on how the "family tree" looks like today and how things are going.
The name server addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are widely known and used. But, is it a good idea to send basically every web request to google first? What are proper alternatives for public DNS servers? Preferably, with some security and privacy in mind?
With Python, you can just open a shell and quickly try out some code in a so-called REPL console. Guess what, you can do the same with Ansible. Browse your inventory, and even remote file systems in an interactive shell with ansible-console.
Hey, we are doing DevOps now. We are 20% more productive. — Are you really? Do you ship 20% faster? Do you have 20% less bugs? And most importantly — How do you measure these? Let's talk about metrics and how you can really measure your DevOps efforts.
Have you built a container image on your workstation, just to find out that it doesn't work on your Raspberry Pi? Maybe your project considers publishing a software for arm64 and amd64, so your users can run it on different platforms? No worries, Podman got you covered!
Wait, there is a GNOME OS? Yes, and it is around since GNOME 3.38, already. Should you use it? Is it a good idea to run it daily? What is different to Fedora or Ubuntu? And why isn't every GNOME enthusiast hopping on it like on KDE Neon?
How do you prove that the last commit was really made by you? How to audit if your contributors are really themselves and not somebody with stolen account data? And as a user, how can you validate that code is coming from a trusted source, when it is just downloaded from the internet?
Ansible
I have an Ansible playbook and want to set a password for my brand-new MariaDB instance. Do I need a secret management system like Hashicorp Vault, Bitwarden or something else like gopass?
Linux
I promised these articles for quite some time. Let's finally start with some systemd. Hated, loved, ranted about, praised ... Well, let's say systemd is at least controversial. Still, it is built-in in the majority of Linux distributions. But why is it so? How does it work?
Podman
Podman is the daemonless drop-in Docker replacement and has exceptional systemd support. With Quadlets, this support became even better and the hassle to work with systemd unit files is gone. It was never this easy to define your containers as systemd services.
Off Topic
Already 3 years passed since the first article on this blog. Let me take some time to talk about the things that happened, how the project changed, and how it feels to work continuously on something that does not profit in a single penny.
Hardware
If you use Linux on the Laptop, you might have some issues here or there with warranties or even proper support from a vendor. But, there are some vendors out there, that do support Linux and some of them even ship their machines with Linux.
DevOps
One of the major misconceptions of DevOps is, that it is complicated and sophisticated. Quite the contrary is the case. It is also about reducing the cognitive load in a team and doing more with less.
DevOps
Many people think of DevOps as something technical, something complicated and hard to understand. But, it's quite the contrary. DevOps is based on methodologies like Lean or Kanban and aims to make the life easier. But what does this have to do with plaintext?
Ansible
Do you use Ansible? Maybe even in a pipeline or across teams? Chances are high that you might want to track your changes and last runs in a nice overview with ARA. Let's check out the nifty tool and investigate how it can help you with keeping on top.
Featuring
Luca is the brain behind awesome projects like Ansible Pilot and AI liberator. He also wrote a couple of books and is present on many community events. Let's find out what motivates Luca to be such a strong part of the community, maybe take a peek behind the scenes and learn about him as a person.
Podman
Podman is the daemonless, rootless drop-in replacement for Docker. Furthermore, you can manage containers on a remote machine without connecting to it first. With Podman's remote capabilities, this is just a matter of configuration files.
Ansible
Ansible is easy, simple, and powerful, right? Sure, and it is a pain to get it right. There are various tools that are meant to help you with Ansible. Let's take a look at Steampunk Spotter, a quality assurance tool, that makes it easy to improve your Ansible playbooks, roles, and collections.
Fedora
Are 6 months already over? It feels like yesterday that Fedora Linux 38 was released. Well, the new release looks really promising. We are finally having an option to boot without GRUB, Modularity is ceased, Linux Kernel 6.5 and much more.
DevOps
Working in a DevOps world means, that everything is automated, fully tested, made in one team, …, right? Well, no. It means that we are having a culture, that supports DevOps approaches. But it also means, that we are having a couple of conflicts, that need to be solved.
Golang
It's finally time for my very first programming article. In the past, you have seen articles about Ansible, Podman and Linux, mostly. But what about making your own program? In this article, we will get started with Go.
RaspberryPi
Right after the release of the Raspberry Pi 5, we are getting a new Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian Bookworm. It features some pretty interesting changes on the Desktop, but also got nice features for the Lite variant.
Ansible
Ansible is a simple, yet proven way to automate your server configuration, cloud deployments and many other things. Yet, most people know Ansible on the command line, which is perfectly fine for CI/CD or if you like to work with text.