For some time now I have been running an 11-36T rear cassette on my road bike. That’s right 36T, not that common. Specific if you are interested it’s this Zitto cassete Reason being I was after a little additional help on the hills. I’m a big bloke as a Doctor once told me I’m not built for running marathons. I’m more the front row of you local Rugby team ...

Having recently move to Jekyll as my blogging platform, I thought I would take a quick look at how easy it is to get going on Linux. Installation on CentOS 7 is very straight forward. First add the EPEL repository for CentOS 7 as this is where you will find the nodejs rpm sudo yum install http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm Install the required packages, note npm is not required but handy to have around. sudo yum install nodejs npm ruby ruby-devel rubygems git gem install jekyll Start using Jekyll. ...

HHVM is a virtual machine for Hack and PHP it uses JIT to improve performance. Installation on a less than bleeding edge OS can prove a little challenging. What follows is what I did to get it up and going quickly for our developers in our CentOS 6.5 environment. It may work for you too. Packages were sourced from two repo’s http://yum.gleez.com/ and http://remi.conetix.com.au/ Things boiled down to these 11 packages that were signed and added to our local yum repo: ...

Oracle Linux 7 was released this last week 2nd of RHEL directives to make a GA release, CentOS being the first and Scientific Linux still to come, currently in alpha. No real surprises here, now comes with the UEK, 3.8.13-35.3.1.el7uek.x86_64, kernel as default. If you what to test it out and take it for a spin it’s pretty easy to using the my lunchbox set of packer templates files which have been updated to support OEL 7.0. ...

So the old blog got a face lift, and when you do that the thing everyone does is to write a blog aticle about it. Well me too but it will be pretty short and not very detailed as there are loads of places that can cover thats better than me. First stop was to move to my own domain name, get over to hover for that and setup www.resilvered.com to point to resilvered.blogger.com and have it server my new custom domain. Note I didn’t go for a .au domain becuase of price and the requirement of an ABN. ...

Some times you just have to make do with what you have. So I considered this morning why is it as IT professional we are often told what tool we need to use to do our job. I mean does a carpenter get told what type of saw he need to use? My tool of the trade is a Mac, not because I’m an Apple fan boy ,far from it, but as a functional computer it really does just work. Has access to the tools I need due to it’s Unix heritage, and provides and usable graphical interface for the less technical in the family. ...

If you haven’t used Vagrant then go check it out. It’s certainly come a long way since the early days and expanded beyond just VirtualBox. Targeted early at developers its certainly a tool that has different uses to different folk, as a system admin I find it handy to test and build SOE’s, deployment scripts and an assortment of sandbox stuff. There are countless base box’s available on line if your are not inclined/interested in building your own. There is however not a lot of Solaris base boxes about , mostly I’d guess due to distribution restrictions, or lack of demand. I’ve experimented with veewee and bento but packer the new kid on the block seems to fit the bill. Since there is no shortage of info on building Linux base boxes I decided if I was going to kick the tires on packer then I’d make it useful and build a Solaris 11 base box. ...

A recent post Solaris Packages for Puppet 3.0.0-rc7, Facter 1.6.0 and Hiera 1.0.0 on a puppet mailing list caught my eye. While gems has a nifty little package management system of it’s own, it is possible be that your machines do not have direct access to the interent so having a local IPS repo is handy. I’ll demonstrate how to add these packages to you own repository. This assumes you have already setup your own local repo. ...