Opensource on The Comfy Seat

What's Missing from GitLab?

Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I was asked what GitLab was missing and I realized that, really, it’s not much. The single biggest thing to me is the inability to create new projects and interact with existing ones from a remote shell session a la gh / GitHub CLI. Other than that it really comes down to polish and aesthetics. Below is my $0.02 based on interacting with GitLab as a person who runs a server and as an end user.

Automatically Starting and Stopping Oracle Fusion Middleware on Red Hat 5

Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

At work we utilize Oracle Fusion Middleware on Red Hat 5.8. As the primary systems administrator for the servers running FMW, I always found it to be a real pain that something as simple as a reboot required me to involve the app admin. Instead of just being annoyed I got with that app admin to learn how the services were started and stopped and then wrote a set of SysV init scripts to automate that process. These scripts seem to be reliable now so I have released the code on BitBucket at https://bitbucket.org/genebean/oracle-fmw-sysv-init. These scripts cover all the components used when running Ellucian’s Internet Native Banner and Self Service Banner.

Vagrant, Veewee, & Me (part 1)

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have toyed with the idea of diving into Vagrant for a while now and, tonight, decided it was time. I decided to be different and RTFM… this left me with two big questions: where can I get “boxes” from and how can I easily make my own? After a little Googling I discovered that Puppet Labs provides a small library of the boxes they use internally. On their page I also found the answer to my second question of how to make my own: Veewee. It seems I have a bit of setup to do before I can start using Veewee but I think it will be worth it. My plan is to bring up a base CentOS 6.4 x86_64 box and then make a Vagrantfile that uses Puppet to configure it for building RPM’s in. Ideally, I will start including this Vagrantfile with the source of any RPM I publish so that building a new one is easy-peasy.