I found this on the debain forums, and thought it might be useful to repost here. With these commands, you can list all the packages that are installed on one debian/ubuntu box, and install them elsewhere really easily. This is useful when migrating services from one box to another, the lazy way. To get a list, and dump it into a file: dpkg --get-selections > installed-software scp that file to your target machine: Read more

I'm working from home fulltime now, for a company that has no physical office. While I've had some teething pains with this, on the whole it has been a good thing. When I started, I had just moved to Atlanta, found an apartment, and had to get on my grind. I was working with a 4’ home depot plastic table, from my 12” thinkpad, on a chair I found on craigslist for ~$5. Read more

When you are running your own repo, installing packages that you built yourself or don't have signatures, apt-get complains, and the puppet run fails. This frustrated me pretty seriously until I figured out what needed to be done. All you need to do is create a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf/ with the contents APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated yes. The smart way of doing this is of course, in your apt module. Add a section to it with Read more

I own a 1987 Nissan D21 Pickup that I purchased in need of quite a bit of care. I enjoy working on projects that progress is a visible, tangible process. This is one of them. I'm going to use the table below to keep myself honest in getting things done. Feel free to completely ignore it. Component Price Date Completed AC $65 7/30/11 Rims/Tires $300 9/9/11 Stereo $200 8/12/11 Antenna $15 8/12/11 Oil $25 7/30/11 TODO: Read more

When nanoc3 was updated from 3.1.6 to 3.2.x, it broke some of my templates, and I was itching for a change anyway, so here we are again. New blog. Hopefully I'm more motivated to post now that everything works conveniently again. I still have to get tags working, but other than that, I think I'm set. Also, I have to test out commenting and make sure my google analytics are still the same. Read more

This assumes that we're running linux, vim is your main editor and you are comfortable in it, and bzr is the vcs you are using. Install puppet, facter, and bzr on your local box: sudo apt-get install puppet facter bzr On the vim side of things, you need to install a few plugins to make your life easier. NERDTree for file navigation Snipmate to make it more difficult for you to forget commas in manifests Read more