To make your workloads highly available on AWS you can use AWS Elastic Load Balancing service. This service allows you to balance the incoming traffic between EC2 instances in different Availability Zones (AZ) within the same region*. This service will scale automatically based on the request demand without you having …

Salt Grains are really just descriptions of various pieces of the operating systems' information on the minion.

As SaltStack documentation states, they basically provide you with "grains of information". This allows you to grab information about the minion such as CPU information, underlying hardware (provided to you by dmidecode), network …

S3FS is a FUSE-based utility that lets you mount your AWS S3 bucket like it's a filesystem. It handles all the abstractions of making API calls and puts/gets of files to the object store. It supports a number of features such as multistore upload, AWS S3 SSE (S3 server-side …

I have noticed the below error when one day i was starting up my KVM virtual machines to play around with Docker Swarm.

error: internal error: process exited while connecting to monitor: qemu: could not load PC BIOS 'bios-256k.bin'

There wasn't much information on google or forums and most …

Sometimes on your RHEL-like system you may encounter the following error:

$ sudo yum grouplist
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
This system is not registered with ULN.
You can use up2date --register to register.
ULN support will be disabled.
Setting up Group Process
Error: No group data available for configured repositories

This …

This one bugged me for a while. Whenever I would reboot my CentOS 7 server with Xen kernel, my console/framebuffer resolution would be terribly low. Since we live in 2016 and have huge monitors, there is no reason to use 800x600 for your screen resolution. Yes, it's nice to …

At first Pillars were something that I could not wrap my head around due to confusing Salt documentation. Eventually the docs became better and with working in Salt extensively, the pillars finally kicked in. They are something that any experienced Salt user should be using as they open up more …

Recently I encountered a package issue in Bacula-server package on FreeBSD 10. The package from pkg system was compiled to use Postgresql while I still use mysqld (I know, I know, I should migrate to pgsql or at least MariaDB). Of course I can recompile it with the necessary flags …

Official Salt docs on installing Salt on Solaris are quite out of date so this article is meant to illustrate how you can install SaltStack minion package on Solaris 10 (x86 and SPARC) hosts. Just like the official docs, we will be using OpenCSW but Salt itself will be installed …

SaltStack has a pretty cool feature where you can manage your systems' crontabs from a central location. You can keep them in state SLS files and look them up via salt cron exectuion module. With a little bit of extra work, you can also keep the crons in pillars and …