BambooInvoice is free Open Source invoicing software intended for small businesses and independent contractors. It is easy to use and creates pretty good looking invoices.

It is a simple PHP application that is based on the CodeIgniter framework. This means it is really simple to install on a typically LAMP stack. I however use Nginx and could not find any notes on how to configure it. It is pretty typical you can get most of the way by reading any of the Nginx howto documents on the web. Personally, for PHP apps, I use PHP-FPM, so you could use this on Howtoforge to get most of the way. That will get you a working Nginx, PHP and MySQL system.

Using Hiera with Puppet is something I have struggled with a bit. I could see the benefits, namely decoupling my site configuration from my logic. However, for some reason I struggled a bit to really get my head around it. This was compounded by it being quite new (only really integrated in Puppet 3), so the docs are little lacking.

There is some though, the documentation on PuppetLab’s site is excellent, but a bit light. It explains the principles well, but is a little limited in real-world examples. Probably the best resource I found was Kelsey Hightower’s excellent presentation at PuppetConf 2012:

I’ve had a another bee in my bonnet recently. Specifically, it has been to do with hardware vs software RAID, but I think it goes deeper than that. It started a couple of months back with a discussion on Reddit. Some of the comments were:

Get out, get out now.

while he still can..

WHAT!? 60 TB on software raid. Jeezus.

Software raid? Get rid of it.

Well this caught me out for an embarassingly long time. There are loads of examples of setting up a TFTP server on the web. The vast majority of them assume that you are using them read-only for PXE booting.

I needed to make it writeable so that it could be used for storing switch/router backups. It is trivially simple once you have read the man page (pro tip: RTFM).

I recently had a conversation on Twitter with my friend Rob Borley who runs a mobile startup. He had asked what interesting perks he should be giving his staff.

My initial response was the standard IT answer. Training, certifications and a lab to play in, which they already have. I like to find the root cause of things, usually that means looking for the underlying reason something is broken. In this case I wanted to put a more positive spin on it. When you have a great work environment what is it that is at the root? The answer is simple: trust.

{% img right https://www.emc.com/R1/images/EMC\_Image\_C\_1310593327367\_header-image-vmax-10k.png %} I’ve spent a significant amount of time recently swatting up on EMC’s new VMAX Cloud Edition. It has to be said that this looks like one of the most interesting storage announcements I have seen in a long time. In fact I have a project coming up that I think it may well be a perfect fit for.

First a massive thanks to EMC’s Matthew Yeager (@mpyeager) who answered a couple of questions I had. He really went the extra mile to clarify a couple of things and the video he made is well worth a watch. Also Martin Glassborow (@storagebod) has interesting things to say as well.

Martin “Storagebod” Glassborow recently wrote an interesting article where he asked “Who’ll do a Linux to Storage?”. As someone who is equal parts Storage and Linux, the same question runs around my head quite often. Not just that, but how to do it. It is safe to say that all the constituent parts are already in the Open Source Ecosystem. It just needs someone to pull them all together wrap them up in an integrated interface (be that a GUI, CLI, an API or all).

An intriguing startup came out of stealth mode a few days ago. Pernix Data was founded by Pookan Kumar and Satyam Vaghani, both of who were pretty near top of the pile in VMware's storage team.

What they are offering is, to me at least, a blinding flash of the obvious. It is a softweare layer that runs on a VMware hypervisor that uses local flash as a cache for whatevery is coming off your main storage array. {% img right https://pernixdata.com/images/home\_graphic3.png 300 217 %}. That could be an SSD (or multiple) or a PCI-e card.

A recent discussion/argument I had on Reddit got me thinking about the cost of solutions we put in.

In an ideal world everything would have full redundancy, and the customer would never have any downtime. Everything would always be up-to-date and keeping it so would require restarting. The reality is very different unfortunately.

This potentially rambling post was inspired by someone accusing me of having “a horrible idea” because I suggested someone put pfsense on an Atom PC as a VPN router for a small office. He then proceeded to expain to me how you should always buy an expensive black box from a vendor (he didn’t say black box if I am honest, I am interpreting), how you have to always have support on absolutely everything. I called ‘bullshit’ and the whole thing went round in circles a bit until we both realised that were actually singing from the same song sheet, but from different ends of the room.

What am I doing today? Documentation that is what. I am writing a document on how to do this. To any Linux user it is a very simple process and I could just give them a link to my own website.

I am not writing this for a technical audience though. The people who are going to perform this work will be the ‘Level 1 operatives’. This translates roughly to “anyone we can find on the street corners of some Far East city”. If I tell them to press the red button labelled “press me” and it turns out to be orange, they will stop. I cannot assume the ability to edit a file in Vi. How can you work around this, well you need to make everything a copy and paste operation. This is easily done in Bash thanks to IO redirection and of course Sed.