Posts categorized under: miscellaneous

Disable DHCP Daemon on Default Virtual Nets in VMware Fusion 5

Fusion 5 is a bit different than previous versions. It adds a lot of network configuration missing in previous versions. There are two interfaces that aren't modifiable in the gui; vmnet1 and vmnet8.

These are default networks created by VMware. vmnet1 is VMware's default hostonly net and vmnet8 ...

Configuring OpenSwan IPSec Server

Introduction

The intent of this article is to walk through the installation, configuration, and general debugging of OpenSwan based IPSec tunnels. Though primarily focused on Ubuntu & Debian systems, non-package management portions should apply generally.

Installation & Initial Configuration

We install using apt-get or aptitude.

% apt-get install openswan

For a basic PSK ...

A Boilerplate Comparison: Puppet

Introduction

Here we cover the steps for deploying a package to a puppet agent/node. Like with chef, we assume a working installation.

Though I must take the opportunity to comment that the installation process for puppet was ridiculously easy.

The ridiculously easy way

Package installation can be performed completely ...

Infrastructure Automation: A Boilerplate Comparison

Introduction

We've been using Chef to deploy our infrastructure for a while now. One of the main sticking points we've run into is the barrier to entry for develoepers as a result of the boiler plate required to perform a simple deployment task. Our ideal framework would be ...

Adding Syntactic Sugar to Python dicts

Snippet

This little snippet allows dict keys to be accessed like attributes. For example

d = CustomDict({"foo": "bar", "bah": {"baz": "bot"}})

Can be accessed like

d.foo # returns "bar"
d.foo.bah.baz # returns "bot"

In addition to the hash key lookups.

class CustomDict(dict):
    def __init__(self, data):
        d ...

The role of religion and science

Greg Fish has a pretty interesting article on the religious victim complex. The comments sparked a good discussion on the roles of religion and science.

In particular, the proposition was made that "S*cience answers ‘How?’; religion answers ‘Why?’".*I took contention with this statement, proposing that science is perfectly ...

Migrated old Posts

I migrated my old blog posts from CCN into this one via rss. It looks like it mostly worked, formatting is a little off so my apologies for that. I'll try to touch them up "as needed".