Working in a technical team distributed across multiple time zones makes it difficult to collaborate and keep everyone on the same page. I’ve used various communications tools to try and help with this and today the team I am working with started to look at Slack. Slack seems ideal for our needs as it provides easily …

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On starting to look at learning using Ansible to manage Windows hosts, first step was to setup a test lab. Setup an Ubuntu 14.04 or CentOS 7 and a Windows 2008 R2 virtual machines. Install Ansible (Ubuntu) apt-get install software-properties-common apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible apt-get update apt-get install …

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I recently came across the role SRE, I didn’t know what this was so researched it a little and found that it refers to Site Reliability Engineers after reading around the subject here is my considered opinion. The classic sysadmin role could be defined in generic terms as “IT operations staff responsible …

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While I worked with Agile as a software tester when the concept first came out in 2002 shortly afterwards I joined a new company in a new role in Infrastructure, IT operations if you will. My recollection of Agile is that it was not a process at all; rather, it’s a set of principles summarized by the Agile Manifesto. …

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Since the company I work for CSC got a new CEO then CTO its changed direction and the latest change has been to participate with the Open Source community. With this news shortly followed an updated version of a tool our new CTO Dan Hushon worked on at EMC with Nicholas Weaver it was formerly called Razor and the new …

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Here I address the most common query people have when using HP C7000 chassis, namely how do the bay mappings work. Half Height Blades HP supply blades which occupy single or double slots, the single height blades map in the following way. Device Interconnect Bay Mapping OnBoard NIC1 Bay 1 OnBoard NIC2 Bay 2 Mezz1 HBA1 …

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I’m a traditional wintel vmware engineer working in the UK in a team focusing on platform configuration automation for virtual and physical Windows hosted solutions. This video of how Puppet can be used to manage Amazon EC2. Shortly after watching this VMware Hybrid Cloud Services launched and on watching …

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