Connect Ansible Tower and Jenkins in under 5 minutes

We often hear from customers that they are using Jenkins in some capacity or another. And since I'm a consultant, I'm lucky to hear first hand what our customers are using and how they need to integrate Ansible Tower. There has always been a way to integrate the Ansible Tower and Jenkins using tower-cli, but I thought there could be a neater, closer to native, way of doing it.

So here we go. I've recorded this short screencast to show you just how easy it is:

 

Below you will find a few links from the video and a link to how to try Ansible Tower.

plugins.jenkins.io/ansible-tower

wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Ansible+Tower+Plugin

Try Ansible Tower

See How Docker Accelerates Digital Transformation in the Enterprise at DockerCon 2018

DockerCon has everything you and your company need in order to understand how to accelerate digital and multi-cloud initiatives with containerization. Come to network and learn from your peers, as well as gain access to leaders and innovators in the container industry.

 

DockerCon isn’t just for developers and this year we have unique experiences that cater to a variety of tech professionals, from developers to sys admins to enterprise architects and technical executives.

Join us in San Francisco this June to hear how industry leading organization are transforming business and IT with Docker’s  container platform, Docker Enterprise Edition. To help with planning, here are our top four recommendations:

  • Keynotes with the latest announcements from Docker and spotlight feature of how Liberty Mutual transformed their enterprise
  • Breakout sessions for business executives including How to Build Your Containerization Strategy, Modernizing Traditional Applications with Docker, and Building a Docker Center of Excellence: Panel Discussion with MetLife, PayPal, and Splunk
  • Networking with technical leaders who have already partnered with Docker, including Lockheed Martin, JCPenney and GE, Bosch, McKesson, MetLife, and more.
  • Schedule time with a Docker specialist for a container maturity assessment

Containerization is one of the fastest growing cloud enabling technologies and Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Compelling ways the C-level can leverage the IoT

Across a variety of industries, corporate IT and operations teams are rapidly deploying IoT to meet core business objectives. The aim of these deployments can vary greatly, from monitoring device health, to reducing operating costs, and increasing production volume. Yet there are a number of other areas throughout an organization, with initiatives of equal importance, where stakeholders have yet to leverage the value of connected device data to achieve their goals. One such example is the C-level. While generally not designed with executives in mind, IoT technology can provide value to the C-level that’s on par with the advantages their IT and operations counterparts stand to gain.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4 criteria enterprises use to pick best-in-class IoT device management

Everyone talks about the excitement of collecting reams of Internet of Things (IoT) data and performing Herculean statistical gyrations on them. IoT data management and analytics are very important: this is how we can accomplish predictive maintenance on factory assets, help robots interact better with humans, and get cars to drive themselves more safely than my 17 year old son behind the wheel.The wise know that IoT data management is relatively easy to implement, but successfully accomplishing IoT device management for heterogeneous devices in-bulk is like navigating your canoe past the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis.What makes great IoT device management?To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia’s HGX-2 brings flexibility to GPU computing

GPU market leader Nvidia holds several GPU Technology Conferences (GTC) annually around the globe. It seems every show has some sort of major announcement where the company is pushing the limits of GPU computing and creating more options for customers. For example, at GTC San Jose, the company announced its NVSwitch architecture, which connects up to 16 GPUs over a single fabric, creating one massive, virtual GPU. This week at GTC Taiwan, it announced its HGX-2 server platform, which is a reference architecture enabling other server manufacturers to build their own systems. The DGX-2 server announced at GTC San Jose is built on the HGX-2 architecture.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia’s HGX-2 brings flexibility to GPU computing

GPU market leader Nvidia holds several GPU Technology Conferences (GTC) annually around the globe. It seems every show has some sort of major announcement where the company is pushing the limits of GPU computing and creating more options for customers. For example, at GTC San Jose, the company announced its NVSwitch architecture, which connects up to 16 GPUs over a single fabric, creating one massive, virtual GPU. This week at GTC Taiwan, it announced its HGX-2 server platform, which is a reference architecture enabling other server manufacturers to build their own systems. The DGX-2 server announced at GTC San Jose is built on the HGX-2 architecture.To read this article in full, please click here

Would You Like To Update Now?

This post originally appeared in Human Infrastructure Magazine, a twice-monthly newsletter from the Packet Pushers. It’s included with a free membership, which you can sign up for here. Your smartphone chirps: there’s a fresh build of the OS and you’ll need to restart. You put the phone aside as the software downloads and the device […]

Using Ansible to generate complex configs.

The first thing I’ll say is that the files referenced are over at github I have been looking around for a good way to generate router/switch configs easily and quickly. Most of the tools I have seen are either not flexible enough or home brew and difficult to maintain. Ansible gives something I can use […]

Book Review: Infrastructure as Code

As part of my 2018 projects, I committed to reading and reviewing more technical books this year. As part of that effort, I recently finished reading Infrastructure as Code, authored by Kief Morris and published in September 2015 by O’Reilly (more details here). Infrastructure as code is very relevant to my current job function and is an area of great personal interest, and I’d been half-heartedly working my way through the book for some time. Now that I’ve completed it, here are my thoughts.

Overall, Morris does a great job of crisply defining infrastructure as code (a somewhat vague and amorphous term at times) and outlining the key principles that are involved. Morris also does a really good job of staying high-level as he works through the various aspects of infrastructure as code and discusses some of the considerations, patterns (and anti-patterns), and recommended practices in each aspect.

The book’s high-level focus is, however, both its greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. Because infrastructure as code can be implemented in a variety of ways with a variety of tools, the book must necessarily be high-level and somewhat abstract. As I mentioned, Morris does a really Continue reading

How to Fully Uninstall Kaspersky’s NDIS Filter

I like Kaspersky anti-virus, and I use it regularly… (Not on my own PC mind you, but on the clients)

While I do believe they provide the best anti-virus in the market, I am not a fan of most of their other products. That goes for the Firewall, Safe Browsing, SSL Hijacking, and of course their newest addition, Secure Connection…

Kaspersky Bloated Meme

In a previous post, I talked about how to optimize OpenVPN by adjusting the MTU to your links. That however, is likely not going work on windows clients running Kaspersky products.

On these clients, once a packet reaches the MTU, further packets could be dropped. Furthermore, OpenVPN process and the whole tunnel could come to a halt.

Investigating further, it turned out the so called Kaspersky Anti-Virus NDIS 6 Filter is to blame. This NDIS driver seems to be incompatible with any MTU other than 1500.

The solution

The solution is to either disable the NDIS filter for the affecting interfaces (e.g. TAP interface), or completely uninstall it as a whole. Kaspersky’s support page seems to be against disabling the filter and recommends uninstalling it instead:

“It is not recommended to use Kaspersky Anti-Virus NDIS Filter by disabling Continue reading

Amazon Web Services Networking Overview

Traditional networking engineers, or virtualization engineers familiar with vSphere or VMware NSX, often feel like Alice in Wonderland when entering the world of Amazon Web Services. Everything looks and sounds familiar, and yet it all feels a bit different

I decided to create a half-day workshop (first delivery: June 13th in Zurich, Switzerland) to make it easier to grasp the fundamentals of AWS networking, and will publish high-level summaries as a series of blog posts. Let’s start with an overview of what’s different:

Read more ...

zkLedger: privacy-preserving auditing for distributed ledgers

zkLedger: privacy-preserving auditing for distributed ledgers Narula et al., NSDI’18

Somewhat similarly to Solidus that we looked at late last year, zkLedger (presumably this stands for zero-knowledge Ledger) provides transaction privacy for participants in a permissioned blockchain setting. zkLedger also has an extra trick up its sleeve: it provides rich and fully privacy-preserving auditing capabilities. Thus a number of financial institutions can collectively use a blockchain-based settlement ledger, and an auditor can measure properties such as financial leverage, asset illiquidity, counter-party risk exposures, and market concentration, either for the system as a whole, or for individual participants. It provides a cryptographically verified level of transparency that’s a step beyond anything we have today.

The goals of zkLedger are to hide the amounts, participants, and links between transactions while maintaining a verifiable transaction ledger, and for the Auditor to receive reliable answers to its queries. Specifically, zkLedger lets banks issue hidden transfer transactions which are still publicly verifiable by all other participants; every participant can confirm a transaction conserves assets and assets are only transferred with the spending bank’s authority.

Setting the stage

A zkLedger system comprises n banks and an auditor that verifies certain operational aspects of transactions Continue reading

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