MyTechnicalThoughts on Slack!

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

Hello there! I’ve got some good news!

I’ve created a Slack Help Channel that complements this blog, you can get help here.

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Build large environments in no time on Ubuntu using conjure-up

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

Whether you need to build a Kubernets cluster, an openstack instance, a hadoop cluster…etc, Canonical has developed a tool called conjure-up. This tool can build these whole environments for the purpose of development and testing, or small environments in a few minutes.

To install it on Ubuntu Xenial:

sudo snap install conjure-up --classic

To start the interactive deployment CLI, just run

conjure-up

or specify the exact software that you need to deploy (called spells in its terminology):

conjure-up kubernetes

That’s it, Enjoy!

Sources:

  1. https://conjure-up.io/
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What to do if docker on Ubuntu doesn’t recognize addition of a user to its group when using PBIS with AD

Posted on August 6, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

You add a user to group docker so that you can run docker commands without having to be root or a sudoer.

On an Ubuntu 16.04 server which authenticates against AD using PBIS, I added users to group docker, but wasn’t getting recognized at all and had to use sudo, which defeats the purpose.

All I did was the following:

  1. Edit /etc/group
  2. go to the bottom of the file where you will find the docker group
  3. change the name of the AD group from lower case to upper case characters and save, e.g.: 
    docker:x:999:hobba\socrat to docker:x:999:HOBBA\socrat
  4. Enjoy!
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Install docker on multiple Ubuntu Xenial hosts with Ansible

Posted on August 6, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

Ansible is an amazing piece of configuration management software. Among its amazing features is that it’s totally agentless and the only 2 packages that it needs on any host are python and an SSH server.

Today we will create a playbook that will do the following:

  1. Add the stable docker repository to the software sources
  2. Add the gpg key
  3. install docker-ce package

It’s assumed that you have already added all required hosts to /etc/ansible/hosts and I’m naming this group “swarm”

- hosts: hostname
  remote_user: domain\user
  gather_facts: no

tasks:
 - name: add docker repo
   apt_repository:
     repo="deb https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu xenial stable"
     state=present
 - name: install repo gpg key
   apt_key:
     url="https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg"
     state=present
 - name: refresh cache and install docker-ce
   apt:
     name=docker-ce
     update_cache=yes
     state=latest

Enjoy!

Sources: Ansible Documentation

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How to clear your bash history

Posted on July 31, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

For old commands, just edit .bash_history and delete whatever you want from inside.

For commands in the current session, just run this command before you exit:

unset HISTFILE

The $HISTFILE environment variable is the one which holds your commands and will flush to the file once you exit the session.

Source: http://www.kossboss.com/linux—bash-history-clearing

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