curl: Modify DNS Resolution

 Posted on 2021-08-08

You can intercept normal name resolution in curl with the --resolve parameter allowing you to do things like talk to a specific site of a DNS load-balanced setup or talk to a new deployment not yet made productive. You can specify the resolve option multiple times so you can even catch redirects and move them to where you want as well. It’s important to note that this intercept does only work on the ports you specify in the entries. [Read More]
curl  sysadmin  productivity 

How SELinux screws with scripts when run over VMware Tools

 Posted on 2021-08-08

SELinux by default prohibits certain things from working through VMware tools (Ansible connection or plain API).

This can be solved two ways:

  • Disabling SELinux: BAD, but easy
  • Writing a custom SELinux policy: complicated but more secure

Note: Adding/Changing this policy through a VMware tools connection is thankfully possible

Example policy

This policy is the base for a VMware tools policy and allows entering the rpm context (yum).

module custom-vmtools 1.0;

require {
        type rpm_script_t;
        type vmtools_unconfined_t;
        class process transition;
}

#============= vmtools_unconfined_t ==============

allow vmtools_unconfined_t rpm_script_t:process transition
vmware  selinux  ansible  security  sysadmin  automation  linux 

Replace Line In YAML While Keeping Indentation Using Ansible

 Posted on 2021-08-08

In theory Ansible should be declarative and have full control over the systems we touch with it. In practice, this is unfortunately not always the case. With this nifty task we can replace the value of a key (given as yaml_key) to a new value (given as new_value) while preserving it’s indentation. - name: Replace values in YAML file while keeping their indentation lineinfile: backup: true backrefs: true state: present path: foo. [Read More]
ansible  yaml 

Looping Dates macOS

 Posted on 2021-08-07

date on MacOS does not support --date, so a workaround is needed. Converting Date to unix epoch, adding one day in epoch and converting back. The Scripty Way Taken from a blog post #!/bin/zsh start=$year-01-01 end=$year-12-31 currentDateTs=$(date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" $start "+%s") endDateTs=$(date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" $end "+%s") offset=86400 while [ "$currentDateTs" -le "$endDateTs" ] do date=$(date -j -f "%s" $currentDateTs "+%Y-%m-%d") echo $date currentDateTs=$(($currentDateTs+$offset)) done The Brew Way As I found out long after writing the above you can simply brew install coreutils and get a date command with the --date option. [Read More]
macos  bash 

GitLab Merge Request from the CLI

Speed up your work with git by automatically creating Merge Requests for your git push

 Posted on 2021-05-06

The Problem You want to push a branch to GitLab and automatically create a Merge Request (MR) for it. There are effectively three scenarios this can cover: Create a MR in draft state with a custom title Create a MR Create a MR and automatically merge if CI/CD pipeline succeeds Manually this is quite the process: Push branch to origin Copy link to create a MR Open the link, change fields to represent wanted state and submit The Solution GitLab offers push options1 that allow us to instruct it to do more than just plain git push. [Read More]
GitLab  Productivity  git  Merge Requests 

Download Full Website Copy

 Posted on 2021-04-01

Sometimes it’s nice to download a best effort version of a website, for example before completely redesigning it.

domain=WEB.SITE
wget $domain --recursive --no-clobber --page-requisites --html-extension --convert-links --restrict-file-names=windows --domains $domain
wget 

GumLab

My first ever product

 Posted on 2021-01-04

As part of my goal to write a book I began looking at how to build a following and where to sell the book once it’s finished. On this journey I found Gumroad, a great place to sell digital products. Given my idea to sell a comprehensive library of code snippets besides the actual book I took a look at existing integrations between it and GitLab.com, my preferred git host. [Read More]
personal  products 

Delete Your Old VMware Snapshots

 Posted on 2021-01-01

For the love of Pete, please delete your old snapshots regularly! Old snapshots have caused incidents and even outages more than once in my career and it is really easy to preemptively look for them and get them removed before anything happens. Why To put it plainly, they can cause issues - like 03:00 in the morning pager alert issues and additionally eat up storage space like crazy. Degraded performance of the VM having the snapshot Degraded performance to full outages for other VMs on the same data store due to rapidly increasing snapshot sizes VMware recommends a series of steps to reduce risk when using snapshots: [Read More]
powershell  vmware-powercli  sysadmin