Sudo, where's my home?

Yesterday has been a very frustrating day of devops for me. Our current servers run Debian 9 and I’ve been trying to ensure that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (until the 20.04 LTS comes out in a few months) can also be used as an OS in our EC2 instances.

All our provisioning / deployment is done through Ansible, and the two OSes are quite similar, so I thought everything would work out of the box.

As if I didn’t know how software works.

In any case, rants aside, I have been extremely frustrated to find out that our playbooks wouldn’t just work. And the reason?

Sudo.


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Disabling chrome material design on mac

I just updated my Chrome for Mac at the version 52, which includes the new Material Design.

Well, I don’t like it at all. Feels way too “Windows 10”-y on my Mac. Also, I’m not very keen on design changes, especially when it’s only for the sake of change.

In any case, there is a way to disable this new look:

  1. Visit chrome://flags (sadly, links to that page don’t work, so you have to copy-paste it yourself)
  2. Look for the option Material Design in the browser’s top chrome and set it to Non Material
  3. Restart chrome, and profit from your new old look.


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Backups: you need one

A bit more than a year ago, an unfortunate accident happened with my 1TB hard drive. If I am taking the time to tell you this story, you can already imagine what happened. And I don’t need to tell you that it was my only hard disk. No backups, sort of.

This specific hard disk was my main storage device: among many other less important things, this hard drive contained a lot of pictures, from my first steps as (amateur) photographer till a somewhat recent future. A lot of data that I deeply cared about.

This was a hard lesson and started my journey through backup solutions.


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Setting up a failover Database for PostgreSQL

This is a short guide, more a memento for me, to explain how I did setup a failover for our postgresql DB. It actually was a lot simpler than I thought of firsthand, but like all devops stuff, you just keep shaving yaks until everything works, and it looks like magic. I am hardly a devops guy, and even less of a database guy. So it definitely feels like magic, and there are many parts / tweakings that I completely ignore.

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come again

Since the very beginning of my online activities, slightly more than 10 years ago, I’ve always had a blog. It felt amazing that you could write a few words and hundreds, thousands of people could read it up. You would feel like a writer, with just a few clicks. Of course reality was very different, and basically no one wanted to read the weird stuff that a 16 year old channels through the pages of his blog, especially when there was no twitter or anything of sort, and the first posts felt more like a few random thoughts.

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