Chris Cowley

Chris Cowley

Devops Architect, Nerd, Husband, Cyclist and Christian in whatever order you choose.

Latest Posts
Spiuk Z16R

Spiuk Z16R

I seem to be writing more about cycling than anything else at the moment. I even have some more posts lined up on the subject, but there are few IT related ones coming too.

Anyway, I just got these the the other day to replace my old Scotts that had …

Open Source and Cycling

I love both Open Source and Cycling, but the 2 do not ofen meet. In fact the cycling industry is incredibly secretive and dominated by patents. It is one of the major reasons that it is very hard to enter the groupset market (for roadies there are 3 major brands …

Letsencrypt with Apache and Puppet

Using Puppet to manage Letsencrypt certs and Apache VirtualHosts

I just Fixed the pro-peloton disc brake problem

There has been boo-hoo-hooing the last few days about an injury sustained by Francisco Ventoso at Paris-Roubaix.

disc injurt

Yes that spongey looking bit is his bone. It is seriously nasty and the UCI have re-banned disc brakes as a result.

However, the fact is that disc brakes are a lot better …

If you are affected by DROWN you are an idiot

If you are affected by DROWN you are an idiot

Drown is the latest vulnerability in OpenSSL. Essentially it allows an attacker to decrypt your TLS session and get data out of that session.

The thing is, it is based on a vulnerability in SSLv2! Here lies my problem with this: SSLv2 has been known to be insecure for …

Using EYAML with Puppet 4

Happy 2016 all

This weekend I finally got round to adding eyaml support to Puppet in my lab. What is on earth am I talking about?

Puppet can use a thing called Hiera as a data source, think of it as a database for configuraion. In an ideal world, your …

Got some new cycling gear

Got some new cycling gear

I\'ve been shopping! I\'ve recently bought myself a new pair of pair of bib tights (for the full Dave Lee Roth effect) and a new jersey. More specifically I\'ve bought DHB Vaeon Roubaix padded tights and a DHB Windslam jersey.

DHB is the house brand of online …

How I Classify Puppet Nodes

The basics of defining what modules get applied to a particular node is really simple in Puppet. Out of the box you just use the hostname and the FQDN and everyone is happy. You find this everywhere in documentation, blog posts, presentations, etc. However is has a problem: scale.

What …

My Openstack clients stopped working

My Openstack CLI clients stopped working, this is how I fixed them

All Backup Solutions Suck

Recently I have been working a lot on a backup solution at work, which has been a painful experience to say the least. Why? Simply because there is no solution that meets my ideal requirements. These are pretty precise:

  • Open Source
  • Openstack Swift as a backend
  • File level restores
  • Scalable …