Blog

My personal blog about tech stuff

As I am working with different technologies everyday, there is no specific focus on a tooling or technology in this blog, but rather sharing stuff which are - in my opinion - interesting for others as well.

Reusable Github Workflows

Do you have multiple projects of the same topic, whicch use the same workflows? Then you might have a look into reusable workflows.

Posted on April 15, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Software Package Management for Windows with Scoop

While installing software on Linux comes naturally with a package manager, this is not so natural in Windows. However there are options.

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

OPA Gatekeeper and issue while doing a cluster restore

We recently encountered a huge problem, when using OPA Gatekeeper in a Rancher cluster and performing a restore of this cluster

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Manage AlertmanagerConfigs in Rancher Projects using Terraform

When using Prometheus monitoring stack, Alertmanager is an essential part of the monitoring, while responsible to send alerts. I explain here how I manage, the respective configuration using Terraform.

Posted on November 11, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 7 min read

Manage Rancher Projects in Terraform

While working on managing our Rancher clusters is the management of Rancher projects. I want to talk about the approach I have taken, which may be useful to you as well.

Posted on November 2, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

OPA Gatekeeper Metrics and Grafana Dashboard

Now, as we have installed OPA Gatekeeper in our clusters successfully, I wonder how to get metrics in Prometheus and show them in Grafana Dashboard

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Filter out elements from a json object in in Terraform

We would like to manage our own Azure Policy Initiatives with Terraform. Our own initatives shall be based on existing ones, but without deprecated policies.

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

What is Open Policy Agent (OPA) and OPA Gatekeeper

I finally caught up on our clusters to have a look at the replacement of the pod security policies which haven been deprecated and it's possible successor/replacement.

Posted on October 7, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Helix, a modern editor for linux

When working on the shell (locally or remotely) and I need to modify a file, I usually use vi. However, I often miss features like syntax highlighting or properly managing indentation,. This is where helix shines.

Posted on September 18, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

What is ZSH and why I prefer it over bash

When you work on Linux, you usually have bash as your default shell. I already switched a long time ago to Z-Shell cause it has some neat features, which improves my productive massively.

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Gitlab and Terraform together

My source code repository for private stuff is Gitlab and while working with Terraform, I want to have the state store remotely rather than locally. What are the options?

Posted on September 5, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Chezmoi - a very cool tool to manage your dotfiles

Today, managing your dotfiles should be easy, so that you quickly can setup your environment and have it working as you would expect to. It all starts with a git-repo - with the benefit that you can share your files to others.

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 7 min read

Importing terraform resources using Atlantis

Using atlantis to apply changes on existing works great, but how you deal with importing of exiting resources? Let me explain what is the issue, and how I solved it.

Posted on July 22, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Manage Terraform with Atlantis in a restricted environment

While we started to use Terraform to manage our Rancher clusters, we started to manually run the terraform commands. This is not the way to go, so we started to look into solutions, starting with Atlantis.

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Migrate kubernetes volumes

We recently changed the storage backend of the clusters and hence introduced a new storage class. The question now is, how do we migrate the existing storage to use the new storage class?

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 9 min read

Import a Rancher apps and Kubernetes manifest into Terraform

While initially setting up our Rancher clusters manually, we started to use Terraform, which simplifies the management of the clusters tremendously.

Posted on June 24, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Introduction to Prometheus

In one of my last post I talked about Grafana, as a visualization tool, we also need a datasource. Prometheus is such a data tool and usually comes bundled with Grafana. So let's have a quick look at what it is and how it works.

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Introduction to Grafana

A recently I introduced you to Grafana Cloud. Some of you might know what Grafana is and what it offers. For the ones who don't, let me introduce it.

Posted on May 30, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Introduction to Grafana Cloud

If you have servers you definitively want to collect logs in a central place and store them for some time, so you can investigate what happens in case of issues. I personally rely on logz.io, but Grafana Cloud looks like a promising alternative

Posted on May 30, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

navi - an interactive cheatsheet tool for the command-line

While I am already fond of cheat.sh and pet, I found another exciting tool, navi

Posted on May 18, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Cheat.sh - unified access to community driven cheat sheets

I already talked about some of cool open source tools, which help you to have cheatsheets and manage your kb

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Import existing resources to Terraform

When working with Terraform, the changes are good that you are not starting from scratch, but you already have something setup previously and now want to manage it with Terraform

Posted on May 12, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 9 min read

Terraform and Hetzner Cloud

While I had already looked into Terraform in the past, I am actually pretty new to it, and just started now to take a better look at it and working with it

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Pet - A Command Line Snippet Manager

I always look to improve the way I work, often also by the help of tools. Github is always a good place to look what's new, and I eventually always find interesting tools which I did not knew before. For example pet, a command line snippet manager.

Posted on April 27, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Terraform

While I am am huge fan of Ansible not everything can be done out of the box. My issue particularly is the configuration of Cloudflare, which I still do via the Web UI.

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

How to install WSL on Windows 2019 server behind a corporate proxy

At my current employer we have to use Windows Server virtual machines as development environments. For me as a Linux fanboy, this is not a very nice experience, hence why not use WSL?

Posted on March 1, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Using a proxy server with groovy script in Jenkins

Sitting behind a corporate proxy may give you some additional security but it's often challenging to get things done. I really had some troubles to get the groovy script in jenkins to use the proxy server.

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Testing webhooks with webhooks.site in an air-gapped environment

As a reader of my blog you are aware that at my employer we are using Rancher and MS Teams for alerting. Unfortunately this was not working properly, so I had to start debugging.

Posted on February 2, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

New ansible role papanito.backup

While using borg since a long, I recently decided to move to restic. As for that I have created a new ansible role

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Unit tests with Python

In my previous post I gave an introduction to unit testing with Java. As personally I use Python, hence I give you a quick intro into unit testing with Python

Posted on December 13, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Unit Testing and Code coverage in Java

I previously discussed code coverage. In this post I would like to focus on code coverage for Java, as a concrete example. As part of that I also introduce the basics of unit testing for Java.

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Code coverage

Code quality is important and as part of this we are usually also interested in the code coverage. But what is code coverage and what we can do with it?

Posted on December 6, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Zellij, an alternative to screen and tmux

Terminal window managers are very helpful. I found Zellij, which seems to be a very nice alternative to tmux and screen

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Docker images for debugging network issues in K8s

Troubleshooting networking issues in docker and kubernetes is often difficult and the root cause can be in different places including the underlying networking infrastructure. I have collected some information which might be helpful.

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Deploy RHACS with Rancher fleet

In my last post I talked about Rancher fleet, as a next step we will manage RHACS with fleet.

Posted on November 10, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Fleet, the GitOps tool embedded in Rancher

There are a lot of different GitOps solution out in the field. But when you are using Rancher, you already have one at hand. As a Rancher user, I had a look what it is and how it works

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Tux-Tage 2021

Tux-Tage is a live moderated online event that consists of lectures, discussions, workshops and much more about the world of free software. The event is in German.

Posted on October 20, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 0 min read

Hosttech GmbH, a swiss-based datacenter and cloud provider

For some reason I got a free version of PCTipp, a Swiss PC magazine. Within the last issue, I found a promoted article about Hosttech GmbH, which now offers a virtual datacenter. Interesting enough for me to register and try it out.

Posted on September 28, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Network simulation with GNS3 and CML

As I am currently working on refreshing my networking skills and as I want to get deeper into network security, I was looking for some courses. As part of this research, I stumbled over GNS3 and CLM, both tools to create virtual lab environments.

Posted on September 26, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Use Archlinux as your pentest distribution

Often pen-tester/security expert/hacker use Kali Linux or Parrot as their distro of choice. While they are great, I use Archlinux as my daily driver. Thus I want to have the same toolset as these distros installed and configured on my Archlinux

Posted on September 19, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

How to add encoded key- and truststore to K8s secret

Working with java applications in kubernetes, you might come use

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Keystore and Truststore in Java

Working with java applications in you might know what is a keystore and what is a truststore. For the ones not aware, here a quick intro.

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Rancher 2.5.x v2 logging using splunk

Installing and configuring logging with Rancher is quite easy, but in combination with Splunk some guidance might be helpful. I guide you trough the process of the complete installation and configuration

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Rancher 2.5.x monitoring and alerting with MS Teams

Installing monitoring and configuration with Rancher is quite easy, but in combination wit alerting for MS Teams some guidance might be helpful. I guide you trough the process of the complete installation and configuration

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Your first Kubernetes deployment

Kubernetes is complex and at first overwhelming if you never did something with it. In this post I want to focus on a simple deployment and putting some pieces (Pod, Deployment, ConfigMap, Ingress) together to get a better understanding for newbies.

Posted on August 17, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Manually create certificates and certificate signing request

As we don't have an automated certificate management 😭 we have to create certificates and Certificate signing request manually. If you are in the same boat, this information might help you.

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Upgrade istio, monitoring and logging from Rancher 2.4.x. to 2.5.x

While we are using Rancher 2.5.x our current cluster management solution, we actually still are using the old istio- and monitoring-stack v1 rather than v2. We want to change that but it is not as easy as we thought.

Posted on August 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

New ansible role papanito.systemd_notifiers

Based on my last blog post, I've created a new ansible role to setup a systemd notification service for failing systemd services

Posted on July 18, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Notifications for failing Systemd services

When systemd services fail you usually don't really notice it unless it's a critical service. However there may be situations where it would be nice that you are mare aware of failing services.

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

How I manage my dotfiles

It is common practice to track dotfiles with a version control system like Git and to synchronize them across various hosts. There are various approaches, so I would like to tell you how I do it

Posted on July 15, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Link Collection Update

Github has a lot of interesting projects and resources and you can easily star them. However, it's hard to remember what you starred so I've updated my collection of links in order to better highlight and find tools

Posted on July 13, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Packet filtering in Linux - iptables, nftables and firewalld

Packet filtering is essential for network security and Linux offers this out of the box. There are different possibilities like iptables, nftables or firewalld, and a basic understanding of these is very useful.

Posted on July 9, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Connect an on-premises network to Azure

While modern companies may use a pure cloud approach, there are still companies which still have their own datacenter. Thus connecting your on-premiss network to the cloud is essential. In this post, I will have a look on how this works and what is required, focusing on Azure, as this is what we currently use at my employer.

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Linux on Microsoft Azure

While starting to look at Azure, I am positively surprised on how Linux and open source (databases) are supported. Thus I want to mention a few words about it.

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Cheatsheets and KB

Until know I have my own cheatsheet section in may website. Even so writing them helped me to memorize some stuff, they are far from complete. Thus I decided to drop them in favor of community driven solutions.

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Authentication and Authorization in Kubernetes

Authentication (who am I) and authorization (what I am allowed to do) are essential and thus having a basic understanding on how Kubernetes handles this, is very useful.

Posted on June 23, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 11 min read

What is the Kubernetes API and CRD

When working with Kubernetes CRDs is something that you will stumble upon, so you should know what it is. But this does not go without understanding the main principles of the Kubernetes API

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

As we start looking into Azure, my employer established a Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative. This is my first course and I will summarize for you what I've learned

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

What is cloud computing?

As I start looking into Azure, I thought it may be a good starting point to look into understanding what cloud computing is

Posted on June 7, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Self-Paced Studying of Programming and SW Engineering

Not everybody can afford a study at an university, either cause you cannot afford it or you have other obstacles e.g a mother or father taking care of children. However, this should not stop you to study what you like. There are some nice collections of resources that allow you to study informatics, programming and sw engineering for free.

Posted on June 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

What is istio?

I introduced the basics of a service-mesh in my last post. Here I will go into more details of isito, one of the most known service mesh in the kubernetes world.

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

What is as a service mesh?

You may have heard the term service mesh but what is it exactly? With this post I try to get an understanding of what a service mesh is and when it is used.

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Crowdsec, a collaborative behavior detection engine

Last Wednesday I was attending the DevOps Connect: DevSecOps at RSAC 2021, whereas a cool project was presented: Crowdsec, a collaborative behavior detection engine, coupled with a global IP reputation network

Posted on May 22, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 11 min read

What is Stackrox (Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes)?

At my current employer we use a container security platform called Stackrox, which recently was acquired by RedHat. But that is it exactly and for what is it good?

Posted on May 17, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Update of packer-vagrant project using HCL

Since I last used packer it's been a while and when I recently wanted to create a new Windows vm, I used my project. This is where I realized certain things have changed with packer since I started the project.

Posted on May 13, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

List of Free Developer Resources (XaaS)

During the years, I tried different services. Some of them offer offered free tiers/plans for developers or small teams. So I thought it would make sense to create a list, which can be easily shared with others.

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Convert Manjaro Linux back to Arch Linux

Manjaro is e very popular distribution based on Arch. I tried it for several months ultimately decided to switch back to pure Arch. But how to do so, without a complete new installation?

Posted on May 7, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Flameshot: A cool tool to make screenshots under Linux

Writing technical blogs often requires to do screenshot, where you may also want to highlight stuff of even obsfucate sensitive data.

Posted on May 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Create an encrypted container in Linux

In case you have sensitive files which you want to additionally protect, you could add the to a zip file and encrypt the zip file. Or you might as well use an encrypted container

Posted on May 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Introduction to Logz.io

If you have servers you definitively want to collect logs in a central place and store them for some time, so you can investigate what happens in case of issues. I personally rely on logz.io

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD) and continuous delivery (CD)

As a developer you are familiar with the terms continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), which is often referred as CI/CD. However it's important to understand that these are different processes with different purposes.

Posted on April 30, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

New major release 3.0.0 of ansible role papanito.cloudflared

I finally found some tome to improve my cloudflared ansible role, to be abel to use named tunnels

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative

As we start looking into Azure, my employer established a Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative.

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Automated OS update with kured for servers running k8s

If you are running a bare-metal cluster you probably run kubernetes on top of some linux os, these systems have to be regularly updated. But an update means sometimes that you have to reboot your servers. This also means during a reboot that particular node is node available to schedule workload.

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

How to know when your Linux system requires a reboot

When you manage Linux systems it's usually pretty clear how to reboot a system. But do you know how to check whether a system requires a reboot? Cause you don't want to reboot a system if it is not necessary

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

What is Cloudflare and why I love it

Ever since I discovered Cloudflare I am a big fan of it. They offer a lot of great products, especially also for me as an individual with a very tiny - or non-existent - IT budget.

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Linux Presentation Day (LPD)

Did you ever heard of Linux Presentation Day (LDP). If not, I will tell you about.

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

How to work with multiple projects in Hetzner Cloud

In Hetzner Cloud you can have multiple projects. As you can have different members per group, it really makes sense to have different projects for different purposes. I will explain in this article on how I work with multiple projects in Ansible, as well when using the cli

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

How to pass lists and dicts as extra vars when running an ansible playbook

Passing simple strings to an ansible playbook as extra-vars is easy, but what if you want to pass lists or dictionary? Let's see...

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Re-use artifacts (playbooks, tasks, ...) in Ansible

I recently struggled into an issue where I have certain tasks which I want to run for the bootstrapping, as well when applying the desired state. I don't want to have to repeat the same task in different playbooks, so I had a look into reusable of ansible elements

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

What are tags in Ansible and how to use them

Sometimes you have playbooks or roles which you only want to execute parts of it and not all. This is where you can use ansible tags.

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

How to push docker images to another registry

Sometimes it may be necessary to 'copy' docker images from one registry to another one - which is a very easy thing to do

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Create Firewalls for Hetzner Cloud using Ansible

Firewall for Hetzner Cloud is relatively new, but since I use ansible I really would like to create my firewalls the same way I to all my other stuff

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Dynamic inventory with Ansible and Hetzner Robot and Hetzner Cloud

I use Hetzner Servers and Hetzner Cloud for my own infrastructure which I setup with Ansible since the beginning. It's usually not much servers so overseeable. However, maintaining static inventory for my ansible project is a bit cumbersome when you already have all information available in the management interface. So let's see what we can do about and how I can reduce manual overhead.

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Story Points - Equating Points to Time

There is often a huge misunderstanding what story points are, so let's have quick look at what they are

Posted on April 7, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Diagrams as Code: Plantuml or Mermaid

Drawing diagrams is a common task as sw developer and one is often used to draw them actually in something like Visio or draw.io.

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

How to get a time difference of two log entries

I recently was tasked with a small problem on how to get a time difference of two log entries

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Implementing a vulnerability Waiver Process for infected 3rd party libraries

Here I want to explain why and how I engineered a vulnerability Waiver Process for infected 3rd party libraries.

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 10 min read

Sign your commits with a gpg key

Often open source projects require you to sign your git commits in order to verify they are coming from you. I made a quick tutorial on what is needed.

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

How to rescue data from windows

My son has a Surface Go Tablet which suddenly stopped booting. Even after trying to uninstall patches etc. I could not bring it back, so I decided to help him to get the data from the tablet, so he can use it.

Posted on March 13, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

How to increment versions in maven builds - alternative to maven release plugin

Maven release plugin does a great job incrasing the version in maven builds. Still sometimes you may need an alternative.

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Update Your Rss Reader

The link to the rss feed has changed

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Switching Static Website Generator

Switching my website from Jekyll to Hugo and the reasons why

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Jenkins plugin repo as proxy repo when behind a corporate proxy

Jenkins is a very popular ci solution and offer a lot of extensibility by plugins. However, updating these plugins while you are sitting behind a corporate firewall. I explain you what is the issue and how we solve it.

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Terraform secrets with SOPS and Azure Keyvault

We are heavily using Terraform and and also Azure. However until now, we left out certain things cause they contain secrets which we don't want to expose in the code. SOPS is a nice solution to solve that problem and keep things together what belongs together.

Posted in development on October 24, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Improvement of Atlantis workflow with azure by setting no_proxy automatically

While we are using Atlantis to to deploy changes to the Cloud infrastructure, we had the issue, that after each new setup we had to re-deploy the atlantis instance, cause we had to extend the no_proxy environment variable.

Posted in development on October 19, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Git-hooks - Automatically check for secrets in your code

Who did not once in his/her life commit secrets to the code and instantly regretted it? Well we can use git-hooks to avoid that.

Posted in development on October 16, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Git-hooks - a practical example with tf docs

You are working on terraform code and want to ensure your documentation is updated after you made some changes. Why don't you use git-hooks for that?

Posted in development on September 27, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Hetzner Cloud referral (again)

Posted in cloud on May 15, 2023 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Declarative pipelines with Jenkins

I guess working in sw development we all know Jenkins and the ones how have to maintain it, knows the pain it can cause. Still, even if there are (better) alternatives, Jenkins may still be the first choice for a lot of companies. I would like to share here some things, which helps to reduce duplication of code and sharing pipelines among teams.

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 11 min read

Regular Expression - ignore or exclude a specific word, find everything else

I want to use a regular expression to exclude a complete word. I need this for a particular situation which I explain further

Posted in development on March 24, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Installation of dependencies of an ansible role

Some observations regarding using dependencies in ansible roles

Posted in automation on February 4, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Hetzner Cloud referral

Posted in cloud on February 1, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Successful jenkins build remains "In Progress" in Bitbucket - and how to workaround

It may happen that even so successful jenkins build remains "In Progress" in Bitbucket.

Posted in development, ci on January 13, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

git hooks

Did you ever pushed stuff to a git repo and then breaking your branch, just cause you did not checked beforehand, if all is fine. I'm sure you did. Wouldn't it be just cool if some checks ran automatically before committing or pushing?

Posted in development on December 31, 2020 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

git

Podman - a daemon-less docker alternative

Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode.

Posted in development on November 13, 2020 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Github actions release workflow

Even so I mostly use Gitlab, I am also active in Github, especially also for the ansible roles which I host in GIthub - just cause everything related to ansible can also be found there.

Posted in development on August 3, 2020 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

My ansible roles

In meanwhile I got some experiences in writing roles and yesterday I finally finished my 3rd role - for me this is much considering my spare time left after work and family.

Posted in automation on July 23, 2020 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Remote Work Tips and Tricks

Posted in generic on March 18, 2020 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Extended Backus Naur Form (EBNF)

A quick introduction to Extended Backus Naur Form (EBNF)

Posted in development, software-engineering on November 15, 2019 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 7 min read

October is Cyber Security Awareness month

Posted in security on October 14, 2019 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Create jenkins JLNP slave programmatically

Adding a slave to a Jenkins master always required to add the slave via the GUI and then gather the secret in order to be able to connect the slave. So I was wondering whether a slave could be created programmatically.

Posted in development on March 15, 2019 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

How to work with git - a newbie guide

I got in touch with git when I was starting using Github. However as these projects were merely single contributor projects, some basic commands did it for my work there. There was no branching, no rebasing or whatsoever. Now after working on a daily basis with git and using it in big(ish) teams, I thought to write down a little guide for newbies on how to work with git.

Posted in git on March 4, 2019 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 12 min read

git

Back again, everything new

Wow it has been already one year since I published my last blog entry. How time passes... Not that I have nothing to write, in contrary there are a lot of new exciting things I have done and learned in the past 1 and a half year since I've started my new job. Hopefully I find time again to write more again cause I really want to share whatever I can.

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Sync git repos between different Git git hosters

Posted in development on March 22, 2018 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Access Github from behind a proxy

Posted in development on March 20, 2018 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Configuration Management and Testing

Configuration management has always been a challenging topic. But what is it? Why is it so challenging?

Posted in testing on December 21, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Cleanup of Windows

I recently run into the problem that my Harddisk (250GB) run full. Especially when installing Visual Studio, different SDKs (.Net, Android, ...), Microsoft Office, etc. your disk space may become rare. The problem is not only because of the size of these software but also cause Windows is keeping a lot of (unnecessary) files in various locations.

Posted in Windows on October 19, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Introduction to Maven

Maven is a tool to automate the building, distribution and dependency management of software artifacts in a project. It is one of many build systems but currently heavily used in the Java world.

Posted in automation, development on October 2, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

Build and Test .NetCore2.0 app with Jenkins

Recently, for a job interview I had to solve a development task: Create a .NET C## application which converts digital numbers into roman numbers

Posted in automation on September 20, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 7 min read

Docker basics hands-on

I wrote quick "Hands-on" for beginners to cover docker basics with simple containers so I won't go into details of complex application, service definitions or swarms. What I want to do is run a webserver inside a container with persistent data

Posted in automation on April 27, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Vagrant vs. Packer

When I started to investigate into tools which help to automate provision of virtual machines, I found packer and vagrant, both tools provided by Hashicorp.

Posted in automation on April 13, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 9 min read

Unattended Installation of Linux and Windows

Unattended installation is the possibility to install an operating system without human interaction. Principally it is the same for Windows and Linux: An "answer file" which describes the configuration is provided as an input for the installer. These "answer files" provide any kind of setup options including how to partition disks and what packages/features to install.

Posted in automation, linux, windows on April 12, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 4 min read

Powershell Remoting

Powershell remoting enables to work on a remote computer as you may be used on Linux using ssh. In difference to Linux, where this is usually straight-forward, I find it a bit more complicated on Windows - however achievable. There are two was a remote PS connection can be established - via HTTP or HTTPS.

Posted in automation, windows on March 11, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

First Docker image for Windows

Posted in container on March 10, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 5 min read

MobaXterm - a powerful terminal for Windows

Posted on February 20, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Docker on Windows

Everyone loves docker even Microsoft embraces docker.

Posted in container on January 11, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Docker and Data Storage

Not everything can live without persistent storage, so let's see how docker offers and handles it.

Posted in container on December 23, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 12 min read

Snapshots with Virt-Manager

My work computer runs on Windows, so whenever I quickly need a VM, I use Virtualbox or VMWare Workstation. But my home computer runs on Linux and there I use KVM/Qemu instead - yes I also could use Virtualbox but I don't.

Posted in automation on December 23, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Arch Linux Security Tracker Announced

Yesterday the Arch Linux Security Team the new security tracker for Arch Linux

Posted in linux on December 22, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

False negative / false positive tests

Software testing is not only running test cases but more of using a testers mindset and skills to find bugs and verify that the software is working correctly. However, usage of test cases (manual or automated) is essential to speed-up your testing and having reproducible tests for your regression testing. Obviously you want to be able to trust the tests - especially the outcome of these tests. However, regardless whether it is manual or automated testing, there are two terms you should understand and bear in mind. So what is it?

Posted in Testing on December 19, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 8 min read

Open data platform of the swiss public transport

The public transport organization SBB recently opened platform for customer information data on public transport in Switzerland. Anyone can obtain obtain data on public transport free of charge and get access to specific public transport services for all licensed transport companies in Switzerland. The platform provides timetable, real-time and actual data.

Posted in development on December 13, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Posted in linux on December 7, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 9 min read

Docker - what is it?

Posted in container on December 5, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 13 min read

Do you spot it ...

Recently found on the entrance of a parking in the city of Lucerne. One of the signs does not seem right...

Posted on December 3, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Segmentation Fault with apps under Gnome and Wayland

Posted in linux on November 29, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Setup Arch Linux on my new Acer Aspire V7 Nitro

Posted in linux on November 25, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 9 min read

Regular Screenshot of a website

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Test Data Management

Test data management is crucial on the test engineering process and therefore shall be considered carefully. But what is 'Test Data Management' and why is it important?

Posted in testing on October 21, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 14 min read

How to report bugs?

When I used to work as test manager I encouraged my people to write issues/bugs that have certain quality. But actually this is not only true for testers but generally for everyone who reports bugs - especially if you are not in direct contact with the developers.

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 7 min read

Microsoft Azure - First steps

Working for my current employer, I have an MSDN subscription and access to Microsoft azure. I also have a nice amount of credits to spend, so it's good opportunity to get warm with Azure.

Posted in automation on October 5, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 17 min read

Regex101

Posted in tools on September 26, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

.Net on Linux

.net core seems promising and can be used on linux as well. Let's have a look.

Posted in linux on September 15, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Unit Testing with Junit

Posted in Testing on August 15, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read

Record your console session

Posted in linux on August 8, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Missing Languages in your Linux Distribution

Posted in Linux on August 3, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Online Books

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Current Date on Shell

Posted in Linux on August 1, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Welcome on my site

Posted in uncategorized on August 1, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 1 min read

Test Data

Test data is very important for testing, but why? and what is test data?

Posted in Testing on April 6, 2016 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 6 min read