I just got a new laptop with Secure Boot and was having trouble getting Windows and Fedora installed in a dual boot configuration.  I read a few posts on how to do it by changing the bios to Legacy mode but that didn't seem like much fun.  Fedora 30 installed to secure with no problem, so I knew it was possible.

I started by paritioning the disk with a GPT partition table and the following partitions:

For reasons I'm running vagrant with VirtualBox inside a docker container.  Most of the time this goes great and no problems, but when it fails it's difficult to see what's happening on the machine.  I've tried and failed to get VNC going on the vm running inside the container. I should note that my problem is with Windows VMs, with Linux VMs it's never a problem to get console. My workaround for Windows is to use screenshots and send keystrokes to the vm via vboxmanage.

First step is to get the uuid or name of the vm

Getting nokogiri to install was failing for me. I'm using bundler and needed nokogiri. Gem is trying to compile it and failing on libxml2.

At first I tried using the libxml from brew, that that didn't work, so specified where to find XCode's version of libxml in my bundle config.

~/.bundle/config
BUNDLE_BUILD__NOKOGIRI: "--use-system-libraries=true --with-xml2-include=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk/usr/include/libxml2"

We build our Jenkins from a docker container, setting up that with code requires setting up the plugin from groovy. I didn't want to figure out how to translate our config for the plain mailer plugin to the email-ext plugin. I started using the plain mailer plugin but decided I'd like to send the email in HTML format. Once again, Jenkins docs were terrible, but reading the code, it looked like mimetype was supported.

I came up with the following code to send an HTML email from the Jenkinsfile

I needed to checkout some code from another repository into my project, but I only wanted a specific directory within the other repository.

As usual with Jenkins, the docs are lacking, but reading the source for a bit I came up with the following:

Talk I gave at #LISA2018. I've given this talk as a half day tutorial, at LISA2018 I gave it in 90minutes. The bulk of the talk is laying a solid foundation on how Linux works. Slides

Updated Cookbook for Puppet 5.
This is the Fourth edition of the Cookbook.

Available from Packt or Amazon

My iPad got updated to 11.3 and I lost the ability to use my usb-midi interface reliably. I had an M-Audio Uno which worked great on 10.3.3. On 11.3 it keeps stopping and a dialog is displayed stating that the "accessory is unsupported".

I think this is related to the M-Audio using more than 100mA. My lightning adapter couldn't inject voltage, so I looked at getting a Bluetooth MIDI adapter.

I made a data_hash backend for hiera that uses the puppet certificate certname to connect to a remote http service and retrieve hieradata for a node. The http backend is up to you, in my implementation I also verified the certificate was signed by the Puppet CA.

This backend uses data_hash, so that it only looks up hiera once per catalog compilation. If it finds hieradata for a node, it updates the hiera cache.

The github repo is located here https://github.com/uphillian/http_data_hash

I wanted to export my playlists with Plex, I installed Export Tools and ended up with CSV files.

I looked around and couldn't find something to convert those to m3u. I did get a m3u8 file but it didn't work with my devices...

I made a quick python script to convert the csv to m3u...it's possibly useful to someone else...maybe.


#!/usr/bin/env python

import csv
import getopt
import sys