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Category Archives for "Systems"

TOWER 2.4 NOW AVAILABLE

We’re happy to announce the release of Ansible Tower 2.4. In this release, we’ve focused on some core improvements for our customers operating in spaces like government and security who have specific needs around authentication and tracking, but we expect these features will be useful to much of our general user base as well.

OAUTH, VIA GITHUB AND GOOGLE

No one wants to manage their users in multiple places, and many groups today use external providers for handling their identity and authentication. We’ve added support for pulling users and teams from either GitHub or Google Apps, using OAuth2. With this, you don’t need to add users directly to Tower - they can use the accounts they already have and are using in your organization.

ADDITIONAL ENTERPRISE AUTHENTICATION

Previously, for Enterprise users who have a standard corporate infrastructure Tower has included support for connecting to an LDAP or Active Directory server for user and team information. But not everyone exposes their LDAP for use with all internal services. With Tower 2.4, we’ve extended that enterprise authentication support to also include support for authenticating to a SAML 2.0 identity provider, and to authenticate against a RADIUS server. With this, Continue reading

Technology Short Take #56

Welcome to Technology Short Take #56! In this post, I’ve collected a few links on various data center technologies, news, events, and trends. I hope you find something useful here.

Networking

A Handy GUI Tool for Working with APIs

In this post I’m going to share with you an OS X graphical application I found that makes it easier to work with RESTful APIs. The topic of RESTful APIs has come up here before (see this post on using cURL to interact with RESTful APIs), and RESTful APIs have been a key part of a number of other posts (like my recent post on using jq to work with JSON). Unlike these previous posts—which were kind of geeky and focused on the command line—this time around I’m going to show you an application called Paw, which provides a graphic interface for working with APIs.

Before I start talking about Paw, allow me to first explain why I’m talking about working with APIs using this application. I firmly believe that the future of “infrastructure engineers”—that is, folks who today are focused on managing servers, hypervisors, VM, storage, networks, and firewalls—lies in becoming the “full-stack engineer,” someone who has knowledge and skills across multiple areas, including automation/orchestration. In order to gain those skills in automation/orchestration, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to end up having to work with APIs. Hence, why I’m talking about this stuff, and why Continue reading

BusyCal and Textual

I wanted to call out a couple of software packages whose vendors I’ve worked with recently that I felt had really good customer service. The software packages are BusyCal (from BusyCal, LLC) and Textual (from Codeux Software, LLC).

As many of you know, the Mac App Store (MAS) recently suffered an issue due to an expired security certificate, and this caused many MAS apps to have to be re-downloaded or, in limited cases, to stop working (I’m looking at you, Tweetbot 1.6.2). This incident just underscored an uncomfortable feeling I’ve had for a while about using MAS apps (for a variety of reasons that I won’t discuss here because that isn’t the focus of this post). I’d already started focusing on purchasing new software licenses outside of the MAS, but I still had (and have) a number of MAS apps on my Macs.

As a result of this security certificate snafu, I started looking for ways to migrate from MAS apps to non-MAS apps, and BusyCal (a OS X Calendar replacement) and Textual (an IRC client) were two apps that I really wanted to continue to use but were MAS apps. The alternatives were dismal, at best.

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IPv6 and SSL for Yandy.IO

Thanks to Digitalocean the site is now fully IPv6 capable. Also, thanks to the awesome service at Cloudflare, just because I can, Yandy.IO is also now SSL encrypted. Your browser should redirect to...

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

A Handy CLI Tool for Working with JSON

While I was at Kubecon this past week, one of the presenters showed off a handy CLI tool for working with JSON. It’s called jq, and in this post I’m going to show you a few ways to use jq. For the source of JSON output, I’ll use the OpenStack APIs.

If you’re not familiar with JSON, I suggest having a look at this non-programmer’s introduction to JSON. Also, refer to this article on using cURL to interact with a RESTful API for a bit more background on some of the commands I’m going to use in this post.

Let’s start by getting an authorization token for OpenStack, using the following curl command:

curl -d '{"auth":{"passwordCredentials":
{"username": "admin","password": "secret"},
"tenantName": "customer-A"}}' 
-H "Content-Type: application/json" 
http://192.168.100.100:5000/v2.0/tokens

This will return a pretty fair amount of JSON in the response, and it presents the first opportunity to use jq. Let’s say you only wanted the authorization token, and not all the other output. Simply add the following jq command to the end of your curl request:

curl -d '{"auth":{"passwordCredentials":
{"username": "admin","password": "secret"},
"tenantName": "customer-A"}}' 
-H "Content-Type: application/json" 
http://192.168.100.100:5000/v2.0/tokens | 
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