No Jerry this time, but we do have Al back!
What have we been up to?
- Jon mentions lug.org.uk and how he’s redeveloping it.
- Stu mentions working with Gitlab Pipelines, compares it to Jenkins, and Al compares it to Azure DevOps (which is the modern, cloud hosted, version of Team Foundation Service, abbreviated to TFS).
- Al mentions that he got Terraform working in Azure DevOps, and using a remote state file.
- Jon mentions that we’ve had feedback that mentions that we’re not explaining all the terms we use.
- Al talks about how he’s looking at executing Ansible playbooks when Windows machines are added to Active Directory. Jon mentions that a Dynamic Inventory module for Ansible is basically just a python script that returns a JSON value, so you could have a python script contact Active Directory and ask for a list of machines in an OU. Jon also mentions about using Azure’s Virtual Machine Inventory to get a list of machines, or alternatively, using Terraform to trigger an action in AWX (Ansible Tower‘s upstream open source project) to provision that machine.
Feedback
- Wayne (from the Binary Times podcast) contacted us to suggest that we’re not being very good at explaining what terms mean. We try to clear some of the terms up that we use!
Techniques for Rebuilding a machine using Post-Provisioning Tools (like Ansible)
- Jon suggests a process of using Git on
/etc/and/home/<user>/with Vagrant to test each stage of the build, and to see what files are changed by each action performed. Once you’ve got your build instructions based on that, you can use something like Ansible, Salt, Puppet or Chef to apply pos-install statements. - Stu mentions using Chocolatey for installing packages in Windows. Jon mentions that using BoxStarter works well for automating Chocolately installs. He mentions using boxstarter paths which are currently not documented –
https://boxstarter.org/package/<yourpackage>andhttps://boxstarter.org/package/url/?some_path_to_a_boxstarter_set_of_instructions. - Jon mentions the Ubuntu Server Vagrant Box file, and the Desktopify script written by Martin Wimpress. He also talks about provisioning Windows machines where Terraform renames machines and adds them to the Active Directory Domain.
Object Orientated Programming
- Al wanted to know more about what Object Orientated Programming (OOP) is, as he’s started looking at ASP.NET and has previously only known Classic ASP. Jon talks about it from his previous PHP experience and perspective. Jon talks about when he used OOP in a previous role to perform network device backups. Jon mentions he’d used OOP in CCHits.net and the now defunct CampFireManager.
Wrap up
We’re a member of the Other Side Podcast Network. The lovely Dave Lee does our Audio Production.
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