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  • Vagrant Ansible Provisioner: working with the Ansible Inventory – addendum

    Recently I wrote a post about one of my dream combinations, Ansible and Vagrant. After hitting the publish button I noticed that there might be a need for a part II – passing complex data types such as lists and dicts to Ansible via a Vagrantfile. I wrote a similar post for when you are…

  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: gather facts in an ad-hoc fashion

    There are times when I really need to get some ansible_facts from a host to work out details about, say the network card, storage, or Linux Distribution to continue coding. And I don’t want to/have the patience to run add a debug step in my Ansible playbook either :) Thankfully Ansible has just the right tool for…

  • Vagrant Ansible Provisioner: working with the Ansible Inventory

    Vagrant and Ansible are a great match: using Vagrant it’s very easy to work with virtual machines. Creating, updating, and removing VMs is just a short command away. Vagrant provides various provisioners to configure the VM, and Ansible is one of these. This article covers the ansible provisioner as opposed to ansible_local. Earlier articles I…

  • Avoiding pitfalls when using cURL in CI/CD pipelines

    Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (or Deployment, depending on your point of view) pipelines are at the core of many successful software projects. When designing your pipelines you sooner or later end up using REST calls to perform certain tasks. cURL is a popular command line tool to invoke REST APIs, and is commonly used in pipelines.…

  • Rendering .adoc include directives properly on GitHub

    I recently worked on an issue where a perfectly fine ASCIIDoc file didn’t render properly in GitHub. At first I thought it was a broken file reference, but when I used the preview in my IDE I noticed that the syntax and link to the file are both correct. And yes, you can tell I’m…

  • Putty-like SSH port forwarding on Linux and MacOS

    As a Linux or Mac user you benefit from a very useful, built-in terminal and SSH client implementation that’s mostly identical across all Unix-like systems. The situation used to be different on Windows. Before Windows supported a built-in SSH client on the command line Putty was (and still is!) one of the primary tools available…

  • Podman secrets: a better way to pass environment variables to containers

    Podman became the standard container runtime with Oracle Linux 8 and later, and I have become a fan almost instantly. I especially like the fact that it is possible to run containers with far fewer privileges than previously required. Most Podman containers can be started by regular users, a fact I greatly appreciate in my…

  • Vagrant: always provision virtual machines

    Since Spectre and Meltdown (2 infamous side channel attack vectors on CPUs) have become public I thought about better, more secure ways to browse the web. When I read that a commercial vendor for operating systems created a solution where a browser is started in a disposable sandbox that gets discarded when you exit the…

  • Creating a Java Stored Procedure in Oracle Database

    This blog post provides a quick (and dirty) way of creating Java Stored Procedures in Oracle Database because I can’t ever remember how to do that. The Java Developer’s Guide details the use of Java in the database, chapter 5 explains how to create Java Stored Procedures. Please refer to the documentation for a proper…

  • Installing Podman on Oracle Linux 8

    Rather than having to use a search engine to read up on how to install podman on Oracle Linux 8, I thought I’d write the procedure down. Hopefully this saves you (and me) a few minutes next time the task comes up. I probably should write a short Ansible Playbook at some point, but that’s…