I've recently been writing OpenStack Nova hooks for integration of newly deployed OpenStack nova instances with our existing infrastructure systems. Though the OpenStack Developer Documentation is very good, there is not that much documentation out there on real world end-user experiences of writing nova hooks. In this …

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If you develop python modules for distribution, you likely use python setuptools. It's very useful and takes lots of the manual operations out of distributing python code and modules. I recently started going one step further and using the bdist_rpm setup.py command option to automatically build rpms for my python code …

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I often use the python setup.py bdist_rpm command on RHEL to build RPMs of the python modules I'm developing. This makes it easy for me to distribute my module via the yum repos internally at the company I work for. At my company, most of our production servers are currently RHEL 6, but we are starting to deploy RHEL …

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Generally, if I have 100 files that I need to edit and make changes in, I tend to write a perl or python script to make them (if I have 3 files, I just open them in VIM and make them manually!) Yesterday however, a colleague who doesn't code had to change 2 consecutive lines in about 400 similar files and wanted a …

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I had an email about the minecraft.desktop file in the config file in a previous post. My kids love to play Minecraft, and installation of this simple GNOME .desktop file gives them the launcher icon on their desktops. 1cat << EOF > /usr/share/applications/minecraft.desktop 2[Desktop Entry] 3Version=1.0 …

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You can now buy your own purple carrots in UK supermarkets: Purplecarrots launched in supermarkets

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When it comes to customising GNOME, its config has always confused me - gconf, dconf, gconf-edit, gconftool - what are they all for? The furthest I've ever delved into them was copying and pasting some tips (give me my minimize and maximize buttons back!). My Linux work is almost exclusively with headless servers …

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Is there anybody in the IT industry that wasn't doing something with openssl in April? I don't use the openssl command line utility that often, but last week it reminded me that openssl command line tool is pretty comprehensive and has some nice features. I thought on this occasion I'd record the most useful ones so …

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Different ways to mirror a remote directory: 1wget -r --no-parent http://server/location If there are any files you don't want you can add the --reject option: < 1wget -r --no-parent --reject="tmp*" http://server/location 1curl

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Subversion's "feature" to store repository passwords in plain text files is a little scary. In my opinion, even a minimal obfuscation routine in the svn client would be better than saving a user's clear text password in text files. I obviously do not want to store my password in clear, so up until now, I've …

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