Bootstrapping a new VPS on a DigitalOcean droplet with puppet client up and running in 4 mins 15 secs.

I have been working with DigitalOcean for several months, on average DigitalOcean deploys your VPS server in 55 seconds. After the server is deployed, all the manual/prone to errors/boring configuration process is needed.

As I am using puppet to configure all my servers I have create provisioningDO rakefile script (based on John Arundel’s book Puppet 3 Cookbook)  to deploy and configure my servers in 4 min 15 sec. It means After 4 min 15 secs, my servers are ready for production.

provisioningDO uses Jack Pearkes’ tugboat CLI tool so, a fully installed and configured tugboat CLI is necessary. It shouldn’t take you more than 5-10 minutes to have a working and ready to go tugboat installation 🙂
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How to Install the Citrix Client in Linux. (Debian way and .tgz all linux flavors way)

1 year  ago I couldn’t get connected to my office’s network using my VPN client. The reason was that my p12 certificate was expired. AFAIK IPsec cannot renew certificates automatically as windows VPN client does. To make it work I needed to renew it using the windows client and then migrate a p12  certificate to a Linux/IPsec friendly format. As I was in a little hurry I tried installing the Linux Citrix client

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Debian Templates Disk Images Qemu/KVM for libvirt

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away when I started with openvz I followed this tutorial for Debian template creation. Now I am adapting it (using my own experience and this template-squeeze tutorial too) to Qemu/KVM disk images than later can be used directly or via libvirt.

This procedure tries to generalize the template. While working with disk cloned images many elements need to be “generalized” before capturing and deploying a disk image to multiple computers. Some of these elements include:

  1. ssh keys
  2. /etc/apt/sources.list

The more “generalized” is a template, the less manual work is needed after deploying it.

This method must work in others virtualization systems: vmware, virtualbox, etc. As it is “virtualizator/hypervisor/emulator independent” as it is focused only in the disk image.

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Installing Puppet master and client in the same host. The Debian way

Since I started learning puppet several weeks ago I wanted to install the client and the server in the same host but using several aliases for the same machine. But there are several funny error related to puppet master and client sharing the same ssl directory: SSL certificate confusion, obscure errors, and SSL revocation horrors.

I took the main ideas from Splitting puppetd from puppetmaster from madduck‘s blog. But using this method you don’t have to create 2 differents ssl directories. Both installations (client and server) will share the same directory. I think it’s easier to implement and maintain.

The golden rule is to create all the SSL stuff (CA, keys, certificates,etc) in the right moment. And you may ask… When is the right moment? After the file /etc/puppet/puppet.conf is created with the certname directive properly updated. As by default puppet create all the SSL stuff using the hostname instead of the alias you want.

This tutorial assume you are using Debian (but should work on its derivatives: Ubuntu, Mint, etc) and have one server with two aliases replying to the same host (via /etc/hosts or DNS) In my case: puppet (server) and mediacenter (client).

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Instalando Debian GNU/Linux con LVM+RAID1 en una maquina virtual emulada QEMU

Alguna vez has querido hacer pruebas, practicas con un sistema operativo instalado sobre RAID por software + LVM (Volumenes Lógicos) y no tienes ningún equipo libre para hacer pruebas. Instala una Debian LVM+RAID1 en una maquina virtual emulada usando Qemu.

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Instalando Debian GNU/Linux con LVM+RAID1 desde el instalador (debian-installer)

Con las antiguas ISOs de instalación, teníamos que hacer instalación normal en un disco, añadir otro disco, configurar el RAID1 por software y sincronizar los 2 discos. Ahora podemos hacerlo de una sola vez. El nuevo instalador (debian-installer) nos permite instalar desde cero una maquina con RAID1 por software y volúmenes lógicos LVM.

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Qemu – Imagen i386 qcow Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (etch) utilizable desde qemu

Hace poco tiempo que descubri el proyecto FreeOsZoo. Basicamente es un repositorio de imagenes QEMU de sistemas operativos libres. Desde la pagina del proyecto FreeOsZoo incluso podemos probar algunas de estas imagenes QEMU online antes de descargarnos un monton de MB o incluso GB.

Como tenia pensado realizar un par de tutoriales sobre aplicaciones, servidores, redes usando imagenes QEMU y debian, me he decidido a hacer una imagen qcow para qemu segun las especificaciones de la pagina del proyecto FreeOsZoo de mi distribucion linux favorita: Debian.

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