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Spreadsheets are not an adequate method to manage IP addressing Different IP design strategies IPv4 Bogons, and the basics There are a number of valid and invalid prefixes for use internally within an enterprise. Here's a list of invalid prefixes in the global routing table; of those, the RFC 1918 prefixes are …
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Synchronizing properly implemented DNS zones is, to put it lightly, a real chore: Creating forward DNS entries, e.g. A, AAAA, CNAME. These names are used to resolve to resources. Creating reverse DNS entries, e.g. PTR. Creating DNS entries that define the zone, e.g. SOA, NS For a system to behave properly, your forward …
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Deploying Linux for the impatient If you've ever wanted to just "test something out really quick" in a live environment, Linux distributions have always been generally lightweight, but that's not the only implicit requirement for experimentation. A Linux IaaS distribution should be: Reasonably secure (basic …
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Failure is not an option! It might surprise you to know that this quote wasn't real - it feels legendary, but was never said by Gene Kranz. It was written up for the film. The aerospace engineering discipline isn't really something everybody gets to experience, so it makes sense that "spicing things up" for …
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The challenge with build automation is too much convenience Think about it. If it's easy to compose and deploy workloads, it's also easy to develop sprawl, and a good system designer would have methods in place to mitigate that. In a previous post I covered how to deploy vSphere VMs with Ansible and the Automation …
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It's difficult to start a new software project Documentation Depending on how a software project starts, it can either be the easiest or the hardest aspect of a new project. Documentation suffers from a similar issue, so a good place to get things moving would be to simplify the basics of repository management. Here's …
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Patience is tough when deploying automated code; Here's why it is important Reliability-centric infrastructure engineers need to focus on careful, procedural, validated workflows; the systems we're responsible are simply too important to casually "toss" infrastructure requests at a common API gateway. We …
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API Interactions are designed to be easy Believe it or not, the IT infrastructure industry is trying to make things easier by building API access out. Programmatic interfaces are a new mental model competing for brain-space with GUI and CLI implementations; we need to play to its strengths: Parsing output from a …
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In a previous post, we covered how to create a virtual machine from a VM template in vSphere using Python and the REST API as an example of service-agnostic methods to invoke infrastructure resources. VMware's PowerCLI is a fantastic tool, but it's not for me. Tweaking or porting functionality from PowerCLI to other …
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