The Aero The Contura Aero is a very special laptop to me. It was the first computer I did not have to share. I was no longer afraid of deleting my father’s work (or being blamed for it). It was a gift from another person. It was a quite an expensive and luxurious computer for Chile in 1994 when I got it. My family would not have bought one just for me. I am grateful for it since it supported…
These software projects and technologies caught my attention and excitement during 2022, though they may not have necessarily appeared that year. My selection and focus have a clear bias as I have spent most of my life developing open-source, data center, and e-commerce infrastructure software on UNIX-like systems. I only included projects I have tried myself. I admire software that solves complex…
My inbox tells me I started using GMail around 2004. The oldest mail I can find in my archive is from 16 years ago. After Gmail, Google Photos, Keep, Docs, Drive and Fit followed. I have reasons to stop. Whether your reasons are privacy, the U.S. as a data harbor, GMail becoming sluggish, karma for killing Inbox, fear about getting your account locked , or you found a better email provider, the…
I have set myself the goal to improve my writing. I read some books and articles on the topic, but I am also looking for real-time feedback. I am not a native english speaker. I found about Grammarly on twitter, but there is no way I will send my emails and documents to their server as I type. That is how I started to look for an offline solution. I found proselint but it seems inactive since…
I have been running some workloads on Raspberry Pi’s / Leap for some time. I manage them using salt-ssh along with a Pine64 running OpenBSD . You can read more about using Salt this way in my Using Salt like Ansible post. The workloads ran on containers, which were managed with systemd and podman . Salt managed the systemd service files on /etc/systemd , which start, monitor and stops the…
Introduction My website has been generated until now by Github pages using a static site generator tool called Jekyll and the Lagom theme. Github Pages Github Pages allows to host static sites in Github repositories for free. It is very simple, you would just put the website in a branch (eg. gh-pages ) and Github will serve it as username.github.io/repo , or via a custom domain by adding a simple…
So Hackweek 14 is over. It started during the openSUSE Conference 2016 on Friday June 24 and continued all over the following week. I had worked on integrating snapshots with Salt with Pablo just some weeks before that and I was waiting for the openSUSE Conference to get the chance to show Thomas what we had done in order to get feedback and figure out next steps. A few days before the Conference…
Introduction Many configuration management tools originate in the DevOps space and become immensely popular and while they do manage configuration, they are tailored towards deployment of new servers using this configuration and not towards auditing of existing servers. For example, lets imagine a server with the following state: /etc/motd: file.managed: - source: salt://common/motd If we apply…
Introduction When we were looking for a configuration management engine to integrate with SUSE Manager, we discussed Ansible with some colleagues that were familiar with it. At the end, we ended choosing Salt for SUSE Manager 3 , but I still often get the question “Why not Ansible?”. The first part of the answer had to do that the master-minion architecture of Salt results in a bunch…
Introduction During the last year we have been working on SUSE Manager 3, the next release of SUSE’s Systems Management product , which includes additional capabilities around Configuration Management and Compliance. This article details this journey from the team’s perspective that may be of interest to product enthusiasts and developers. Sweet did not last In mid-2014 I wrote about…
Back in March, Christian Stankowic analysed Spacewalk 2.1 and its new user interface look and feel. He asked himself how SUSE Manager would look like: I really appreciate this update! The new interface looks more clean and well-designed than the elderly look. I’m really interested to see what the implementation in SUSE Manager will look like and whether Red Hat Satellite will also get a new…
Today I used some of the coolest openSUSE Build Service features: project layering, patches against linked packages and aggregates. I want to write about them. I needed to test a feature in PackageKit. I am using openSUSE 11.0. However upstream PackageKit does not play nice with 11.0. Stefan Haas fixed this, taking our PackageKit sources, adding some patches, and building them in his home project…
Participating in a opensource community has lot of advantages, you get to know really cool people. You learn lot of new things… but also strange anecdotes happen. Some time ago I was talking with Will , and we both remembered one of the most funniest (now) things ever happened in #kopete irc channel. We laughed a lot, until Will told me. “I still have those logs somewhere”. I…