Good, fast, cheap: the triangle in one diagram
Cheap and good is long, cheap and fast is ugly, good and fast is expensive, and the middle of the diagram is marked NO. A budget conversation in one image.
pushpanel
Four ways to get files into a git repository
Web editor, GUI client, command line or an IDE — the same commit made four ways, and which one suits a one-line fix versus a whole theme.
FreeBSD 12.1: changing the default shell for jexec
chsh, .profile and a path argument all fail to give jexec a different shell. Reading jexec.c shows why, and where the hardcoded /bin/sh comes from.
FreeBSD jails: extending the jls command
jls reports the parameters a jail was defined with, not what it is doing now. A small script adds process counts, users and live state to the same table.
Installing Portainer on a remote machine over SSH
Portainer's setup screen is served on port 9000 and expects a browser. An SSH tunnel puts that screen on your own laptop, with no X server on the box.
Trigger a Jenkins job from Bitbucket Pipelines
Two Jenkins plugins, a parametrised job and one curl line in bitbucket-pipelines.yml — passing the commit hash across without a webhook in sight.
Mattermost 5.19 on FreeBSD 12.1, inside a jail
Self-hosting Mattermost from the FreeBSD port: the jail, the database user, TLS with Let's Encrypt behind Cloudflare, and a working server in five minutes.
svn: E175002: Received fatal alert: protocol_version
Jenkins could not check out from Subversion behind Cloudflare. The alert is a TLS version mismatch between SVNKit and a repository set to TLS 1.3.
Install a master Kubernetes cluster on CentOS 8
The CentOS 8 walkthrough, where podman replaces docker and firewalld behaves differently — every command from a clean install to a joined worker node.
Filebeat for custom Nginx logs on FreeBSD 12.0
Filebeat's Nginx module expects the default log format. Changing the grok patterns, adding a field and loading the ingest pipeline so Kibana parses your own.
Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm: a simple comparison
Installation, scaling limits, load balancing, rollbacks, updates and logging, side by side — where Swarm is simpler and where Kubernetes earns the effort.
Install a master Kubernetes cluster on CentOS 7
From the virtualisation flags a node needs to a working master: firewall rules, swap, kubeadm init, the pod network and joining the first worker.
Inside an APC APCRBC124 UPS battery cartridge
Eleven photographs of an APCRBC124 taken apart: the glued sticker plate, the connector holder and the two 12V sealed lead-acid cells behind it.
Upgrading firmware on an HP 2620-24-PoEP from the GUI
The switch keeps a primary and a secondary image, so an upgrade has a way back. Finding the right SWI file for a J9625A and flashing it from the GUI.
Setting time and date on an HP 2620-24-PoEP switch
Three ways to give an HP 2620-24-PoEP the right time: an NTP server found with dig, SNTP unicast, or typing it in by hand over the console.
A release process built on trunk, tags and branches
Who owns trunk, what a tag is for, and where a developer's branch fits — the repository layout behind a release, drawn as one diagram.
Colour coding error categories: error, warning, notice
Three severities, three colours, and one sentence each saying what the reader is expected to do about it. The whole convention on one screen.
Report-level date settings in Google Data Studio
A date selector that refuses to go report-level usually has a hidden element fighting it. Ctrl+A finds it in seconds, page by page.
Hello to Gutenberg, goodbye to the classic editor
Gutenberg turns a WordPress post into blocks. Good for new designs, awkward for the thousands of posts already saved in the old editor.
WordPress 5.0: the editor encountered an unexpected error
WordPress 5.0 auto-updated, took the classic editor with it, and drafts stopped opening. What the error actually is, and how to get editing again.
First performance numbers from MySQL 8.0
MySQL 8.0.11 measured against 5.7 on 50,000-row tables: 2% faster, 2% less I/O, more memory — and an apr-util build that needed a patch.