Recent content on Alex Kraker
This is a repost of my GitHub profile announcement that I’m moving to Codeberg. Read the original at Moving to Codeberg . There’s a certain irony in the fact that I never felt the need to create a GitHub profile README until now. I’m creating this mostly to let folks who may look for me here that I’ve moved to Codeberg at codeberg.org/kraker . I’m still in the process…
Standing up a self-hosted GitHub Actions Runner on RHEL 10 as a daemonized service. This assumes you have a RHEL 10 server that can host a self-hosted runner. I’m playing around with CI/CD pipelines to automate building custom RHEL images to use for development/testing. That’s my current use-case, but I’m sure there are many reasons you might want to stand up self-hosted runners…
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash This is my fairly opinionated quick reference on how to learn Python. This isn’t so much a guide as it is something to launch from. There are already plenty of guides. I’m writing this with the novice in mind, but the seasoned programming veteran may derive something useful here. Learn by doing Learn by doing seems to trump most other methods for…
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash Technical Learning I’ve always been interested in what I like to call meta-learning or ways that I can be a more effective learner. This goes all the way back to my school days and I remember learning about ways that drawing mind-maps was more effective for visual learning and that da Vinci kept notebooks, and so I started doing that too. I started trying…
The kmod-kvdo module is used to enable VDO in kernel usespace. On RHEL it’s primarily used to thin provision logical volumes with LVM. See the links below. Useful links Upstream open source dmo-vdo/kvdo project. RHEL 9 Introduction to VDO on LVM Install & enable kvdo Install kmod-kvdo: dnf install -y kmod-kvdo Enable kernel module kvdo with: modprobe -v kvdo Under normal conditions, this…
Sometimes I need to be able to spin up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server in a local development environment for testing. For many use-cases spinning up a free Rocky Linux image is sufficient to test in an environment that’s a relatively close facsimile to a RHEL-proper environment. But for those cases where you can’t get around needing to test in a RHEL environment then…
Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash I’m a religious note-taker. Back in my school days, I kept lots of notebooks and I had a habit of always carrying around a Moleskine and jotting down ideas, writing notes, or journaling. Now many years later I’ve developed a habit of writing my notes in digital form. Mostly this was so that I could make them searchable. At first, my notes started out as…
Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash I recently had someone reach out to me on LinkedIn asking if I would mentor them on Ansible. Like many sysadmins I know I’m short on bandwidth and regretfully had to decline. But I did offer a book recommendation and a link to the Ansible Discord I sometimes frequent… But this was enough to inspire me to write up some of my thoughts on learning…
This page has moved to paperstreetco/resources/learn_devops.md .
In November of 2019, I started working as a Tier 1 support agent at a web-hosting company in the Denver, CO area. Just shy of 18 months later I was promoted to Managed Hosting Analyst, which is a Linux Sysadmin role. I retained a couple roles between then. I was promoted to Tier 1 Expert at about 3 months in, and around 9 months later I received a promotion to Advanced Product Support, which is…
I recently learned that the greatest predictor of success in an endeavor is not anything you would typically think. It’s not IQ, socioeconomic status… whether you grew up rich or poor, or whether you had good parents. Actually, it’s a difficult to define quality called grit . To give an example, with enough grit you can overcome all odds and become a navy seal. Just take a look…