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Feb
1stStuff to see : Puppet, PEX, and moreI know it has been a while since i have posted. I have been deeply engrossed in my work here at VMware and hopefully will have some extremely cool things to show for it later this year. But I am coming out of the basement for a couple of cool things in the month of February. First I will be doing the keynote for the Toronto VMUG next week. Go here to register and view the great sessions and more that will be available. I will be presenting on Cloud + Automation and giving my perspective on why this is such an awesome time to be diving into automation. I am also going to be co-presenting a session at VMware Partner Exchange 2013 alongside Nigel Kersten (CTO PuppetLabs) on some exciting new stuff from VMware and PuppetLabs. This is a must-attend session as we will be presenting some extremely cool never-before-seen stuff with a live demo . The session info is: ‘VPN1298 – Next Round of Cloud Configuration Automation Using Puppet and VMware’ and it takes place at 2pm on Wednesday. I also have some forthcoming stuff for the community as a whole in the next couple months around some code my team and I have been working on. This year is going to be a busy one for VMware cloud and automation. .nick
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May
25thAlternate PXE/iPXE Config : RazorCertain user may encounter issues with PXE/iPXE and Razor with specific broadcom networking cards. There is an alternate way to configure DHCP for Razor and I have created a Wiki page on the Razor project to walk your through setting it up. Go here to read the page: https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor/wiki/Alternate-Pre-boot-Options-for-Compatibility .nick
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May
21stLex Parsimoniae : Cloud Provisioning with a Razor
Blogging has been very difficult for me over the last 4 months. My move to the Office of the CTO within EMC changed much of what I did and left me searching for content I could write about. Most of what I was dealing with on a daily basis was either too early to mention or too secret to reveal. Today, this changes with the release of a project I have spent the majority of my days and nights working on this year. Without long-worded wind up I am proud to announce the release of Razor, a cloud-provisioning tool to change the way we look at provisioning hardware for cloud stacks. Razor is a software application, which is a combination of Ruby (main logic) and Node.js (API, Image Service) for rapidly provisioning operating systems and hypervisors for BOTH physical and virtual servers. It is designed to make standing up the base substrate underneath cloud deployments both simple and transactional. Now at this point, many of you are thinking: “Great, another *cloud* provisioning tool.” And I don’t blame you at all. So what makes Razor different than many other tools out there like Cobbler, Dell’s Crowbar, or other deployment services? Just about everything. The real answer to that question is related to the reason this project is named Razor. We based much of our design theory after Ockham’s razor. It is based on the belief that OS/hypervisor deployment should be simple, succinct, and incredibly flexible. Many products out there try to [...]
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Feb
11thManic Innovation Challenge(Feb) : UBER Twitter Stats
UPDATE : As of last week UBER Twitter Stats are offline. The account used for replying to requests was tagged as spam and blocked. I don’t plan on moving to a new account. Instead I am going to work on a replacement which should rock even more. Continuing my pursuit of the Manic Innovation Challenge I am proud to release my newest *dumb* idea: UBER Twitter Stats! NEW UPDATE – Based on some tips (thanks: Brian Katz @bmkatz) some of the details haved changed below to make UBER Twitter Stats work a little easier. The same old command style still works. But the newer one is much easier. Written in 100% Ruby and running in the cloud, UBER Twitter allows you to ask me (technically my cloud-like proxy @myubertwit) for interesting recent stats about your Twitter account. It is really quite simple. Send a tweet to my app account (@myubertwit) with the text: “<command>”. With the command being one of the following: My Word Count – Will reply with the top 20 words you used recently. This automatically strips out very common words. Shortcut: ‘mwc’ Mention Word Count – This will reply with the same as the above but for tweets that mention or are to you. Shortct: ‘mmwc’ Who I Mention – This will list the top 20 people you talk to or mention in your recent tweets. Shortcut: ‘wim’ Who Mentions Me – This will reply back with the top 20 people who have mentioned you the most lately. [...]
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Jan
11thQuick Update : UNF version 1.701I got some feedback that some users running Snow Leopard were crashing every time they started UNF. Turns out there was a method being used on a Cocoa control that required changes made in the 10.7 SDK. I rewrote the function to not need the method and have released a new version (version 1 build 701). All download links are updated but you can download the new version here: UBER Network Fuser 1.701 Download Lion users don’t need to update. Thanks, .nick
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Jan
10thBreaking new ground : An UBER Tool for the Mac
A few months ago I bought my first Mac. I had been a hardcore Windows workstation kind of guy. And being a C# coder in the late hours of the night it was all I needed. But, after seeing my former teammates (vSpecs) using their sexy Mac Books I finally made the switch. I picked up a Mac Book Air and from the minute I started using it, fell in love with everything about it. Because of this switch I have come to learn the things that the Mac (and Lion) do really well with some things while Windows does better with others. For almost all of my UBER projects I use my beefy Windows workstation running VMware Workstation to setup my lab/dev environments. But, recently I started trying to move over to my Mac and using VMware Fusion to build lab virtual machines for developing. And to my surprise I found that things in the Fusion world aren’t quite the same as for Workstation. Namely, the networking options are rather limited. By default you only get the choices of three networks 1) DHCP w/ NAT 2) DHCP and 3) Bridging to a physical interface. For me that meant that I couldn’t get a network without DHCP (important if you are testing it) or create multiple isolated networks like I could on Workstation. So I went digging and found that at one point someone has written some slick scripts to allow for custom multi-network setup but it stopped being updated [...]
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