Yesterday saw probably the biggest FLOSS news in recent times. Certainly the biggest news of 2014 so far :-) By some freak of overloaded RSS readers, I missed the announcement, but I did see this:

Day 1 at the new job. Important stuff first.. Where do I get my Red Hat ?

— Karanbir Singh 🐧 (@KaranOrg) January 8, 2014

It did not take long to dig up this and this, where Red Hat and CentOS respectively announce that they have joined forces. Some things from the announcement struck me:

I had a request on Reddit to share a document I wrote about connect Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Active Directory. The original document I wrote is confidential, but I said I would write it up.

This works for both Server 2008(R2) and 2012. If I recall correctly it will also work with 2003, but may need to minor terminology changes on the Windows side. From the Linux side, it should be fine with RHEL 6 and similar (CentOS and Scientific Linux). It should also apply to Fedora, but your mileage may vary.

Okay, I know I am little slow on the uptake here, but I was on holiday at the time. The announcement of Virtual SAN at VMWorld the last week got me thinking a bit.

Very briefly, Virtual SAN takes locally attached storage on you hypervisors. It then turns it into a distributed object storage system which you can use to store your VMDKs. Plenty of other people have gone into a lot more detail. Unlike other systems that did a similar job previously this is not a Virtual Appliance, but runs on the hypervisors themselves.

This is a post which breaks from the normal subjects of Linux and storage.

Today I am going to share a very simple recipe for what I drink when I am cycling. I have some fairly simple requirements for this. 1. It must work (it must rehydrate me effectively) 1. It must not be a rip off 1. I want to have a at least a reasonable idea of what is in it.

{% img right https://www.hastexo.com/system/files/imagecache/sidebar/20120221105324808-f2df3ea3e3aeab8\_250\_0.png %} As I promised on Twitter, this is how I automate a GlusterFS deployment. I'm making a few assumptions here:

• I am using CentOS 6, so should work on RHEL 6 and Scientific Linux 6 too. Others may work, but YMMV.
• As I use XFS, RHEL users will need the Scalable Storage option. Ext4 will work, but XFS is recommended.
• That you have a way of automating your base OS installation. My personal preference is to use Razor.
• You have a system with at least a complete spare disk dedicated to a GlusterFS brick. That is the best way to run GlusterFS anyway.
• You have 2 nodes and want to replicate the data
• You have a simple setup with only a single network, because I am being lazy. As a proof-of concept this is fine. Modifying this for second network is quite easy, just change the IP address in you use.

{% img https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1XA7GH3a4BL1uszFXrSsZjysi59Iinh-0RmhqdDbt7QQ/pub?w=673&h=315 'simple gluster architecture' %}

Dell has announced the new PowerEdge VRTX (pronounced Vertex). The name comes from a vertex being “the intersection of multiple lines”, alluding to this being a mixture of a rack server, a blade server and a SAN.

It is aimed at branch offices, so it contains 4 servers, storage, networking and (unusually) the ability to add PCI-e cards (up to 8, including 3 FH/FL). These cards can be connected to which ever server you want. These features put in competition with the HP C3000 and the Supermicro OfficeBlade.

I have been a little slow on the uptake on this one. I would like to say it is because I was carefully digesting the information, but that is not true; the reality is that I have just had 2 5 day weekends in 2 weeks :-).

The big announcement at this years EMC World is ViPR. Plenty of people with far bigger reputations than me in the industry have already made their comments:

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.

It then got re-awakened the other day when Matt Simmons (aka The Standalone Sysadmin) asked on Twitter for people’s opinion on software RAID.