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Mac M1 development
For years I’ve been using a Mac for development and it’s been great. But when I switched to a new Macbook Pro M1, an inconvenient truth emerged: I’ve been running development and production on different platforms. Year after year, for bash, python, Ruby, Rails, deploying to real servers, AWS EC2, Docker/Fargate, etc, everything just worked… […]
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Ansible, python and mysql… untangling the mess
Nearly every “how to” article or tutorial on the web describes one way of using Ansible, python, and connecting to MySQL as if that was the only solution. Many don’t note code versions used, or even the pub date, and the Internet is rife with simply bad advice. I finally gave up researching all this […]
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Ubuntu 14.04… apt-get install “disk full” error (aaack!)
Recently we have been considering moving some MySQL database services from our cloud servers to Amazon RDS to simplify our management tasks, and wanted to run atop on some Ubuntu 14.04 LTS machines to get an initial sizing for RDS instances. While trying to apt-get install the atop package, I was getting a “disk full” error, […]
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basic_vsftpd cookbook for Chef
Recently I was rebuilding an old “virtual user” vsFTPd server, this time using Chef. Of course I started by looking for a decent vsftpd cookbook. There are several popular ones, for example: The vsftpd “supermarket” cookbook might be fine for some users, but it’s not been updated since 2010, and it seems to lack a good way to override […]
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Authenticating vsFTPd virtual users with pam_pwdfile.so
For years, the standard way to set up password authentication for vsFTPd FTP server was to use PAM with the pam_userdb.so module. It looks great on paper, but if you have tried this, you know that generating a Berkeley DB password file is a PITA, debugging is blind and brutal, and password file generation does not play well with automated deployments. […]