brasey

Webcam stops working on Fedora 20

Tech stack

• Dell XPS 12
• Fedora 20
• Google Chrome 38.0.2125.111 (64-bit) or
• Cheese or

brasey

ownCloud on Raspberry Pi running Pidora

The what you say?

I won a Raspberry Pi at the IBM booth at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014!

Raspberry Pi is awesome and delicious. What's not to love about a $35 computer the size of a deck of cards?

I've been using a Pi for some time now connected to an external drive that acts as my backup server. I use duplicity to SSH files to the Pi storage. Simple, easy and effective. It's been working great for years, but lately I've been wanting something more modern, something that I can use to both store files and retrieve them easily, from computers and phones. You know, like Dropbox.

brasey

Create an AMI using Packer

What is Packer?

Packer is a tool from Hashicorp that allows you to create machine images in a variety of formats from a single spec file. This can be a very powerful thing when you want to automate the deployment of applications to a variety (or even just more than one, really) platforms.

In our case, we want to deploy an application to VMware and AWS, and soon to Docker. Doing that with a single spec file gives us

• platforms that are consistent, even if they're different

brasey

Use AWS CLI and jq to do some things

I'm just getting up to speed on AWS, and so I'm learning my way around the CLI. It's nice and easy to do lots of things from the CLI, like querying, creating and destroying instances and images. There are lots of fiddly bits involved in parsing output so it can be used by a script or something, though, so here are some notes.

Tools

AWS CLI

Obviously you need the AWS CLI. It's an easy install using pip. Go here to find documentation and other install methods.