Category Archives: Uncategorized

I sometimes describe Vertical Sysadmin as a “boutique” training firm. According to Merriam-Webster, “boutique” means “a small company that offers highly specialized services or products”. Our specialty is highly effective training for teams supporting modern IT infrastructures. We don’t just … Continue reading →

When you install CFEngine from package, the packaged post-installation script generates a cryptographic identity for the host which is used to identify the host in CFEngine. CFEngine uses the host’s cryptographic identity to identify the host as IP addresses can … Continue reading →

I’ll be teaching “Setting up CI/CD Pipelines” at Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus on Sep 29th, and at USENIX LISA in San Francisco on Oct 31st. My colleague Mike Weilgart will be teaching Git Foundations: Unlocking the Mysteries at both conferences. … Continue reading →

About 15 years ago, I was the only UNIX sys admin in a factory, and I was asked to help with a “network issue” which hit the Help Desk. The problem, it was explained to me, was that the network … Continue reading →

USENIX Annual Technical Conference and LISA are the first professional conferences I went to as a fledgeling sysadmin. USENIX will always hold a special place in my heart. I attribute my professional success to regular training at USENIX conferences. I … Continue reading →

Hat tip to my DevOps buddy Joaquin Menchaca for this one-liner to find out what AWS region your VM is in: AWS_REGION=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed -e 's/[a-z]$//') I am going to use it to bootstrap my Kubernetes VMs to … Continue reading →

I recently added my account to /etc/sudoers on N servers using Ansible in raw mode (running a shell oneliner). We use visudo to edit /etc/sudoers when we are logged into a server, but since I was doing this in “batch” … Continue reading →

CFEngine Enterprise makes it absurdly easy to track deployed servers. All you have to do is spin up a hub, install the lightweight agent on each host, and run cf-agent –bootstrap <hub> to setup a trust relationship between hub and … Continue reading →

I am working on setting up a “reporting portal” CFEngine Enterprise hub to aggregate inventory from several hubs in different parts of a company (managed by different organizations). This one “superhub” would allows executives instant insight into infrastructure integrity. While … Continue reading →