I also have a presentation and live demonstration on the below, so far given at DevSecOps - London Gathering June 13 2018. This article has also been published on Medium The mantras of software as a service, stateless, cattle vs. pets, etc, are often and loudly repeated, but in many environments you often don't have to look too far before you find some big fat pet box sprawling somewhere. Maybe it is the in-house file server, maybe something else, but if your infrastructure is in the cloud then it is most likely going to be your Bastion server (or 'jump box'). Here I look at the problem, look at a couple of options and present a solution that I implemented providing Bastion ssh as a stateless service on AWS - the code is available on GitHub and also published on the Terraform Module Registry. Whilst the principles are applicable universally, this specific solution employs a Terraform plan to deploy to AWS. If you are not using AWS then you might find concentrating on the cloud-config user data stuff more useful as the rest would need to be ported, e.g. for DigitalOcean etc. If you're using GCP then to be honest you probably don't need this at all.

**25 Minute reading time  **(but article is composed of short, numbered sections!)

One of the big differences between being a good hobbyist with Linux and working commercially with it is dealing with proprietary software. You can use and configure all sorts of systems indefinitely on your own account and never come up against dealing with awkward proprietary software that is supposedly officially supported for your platform that you really need to make work. Recently I had this experience. Not only was I able to get it working but I was able to extend it beyond the manufacturer's original provision to make it more user friendly and less work to administer.

Configuration management tools are a big deal these days.  Just as with Puppet, Chef and Salt, a lot of material written about Ansible presumes either a lab environment or one focussed on servers, or both. Virtualisation is also considered 'a given'- Docker and Vagrant are both popular- and the guides expect that you are implementing on green-field estate. I thought it would be useful to write about real-world experience and use in the opposite scenario: desktop more than server, physical rather than virtual machines and a 'mature' environment. Oh, and learning as we go along.

Documentation. Not something to get excited about is it? Who wants to read a manual? Or a policy document? A reference guide even? How about if we could make it easier? More accessible? More relevant? I think we can, using ebooks, and in this paper I will expand on this. In case it isn’t obvious, this paper is intended for people with a technical interest. I give a description of the real world challenges and then 2 real-life examples illustrating where ebook solutions answer them. The majority of the software referred to is free and/or open source. None of it is meant to constitute a commercial endorsement.

If you use or administer Red Hat Linux or a derivative of it, such as CEntOS then you have likely heard of or come across SELinux. SELinux is not universally loved and has a reputation for being something that admins learn just enough about to turn off lest it break their system at some inopportune moment. Is this reputation fair? Should we be making the effort to learn to use it properly or is it best left on the shelf? The following is based on my own experience learning to administer selinux in preparation for the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) exam for RHEL7 and conversations with system administrators (and in some cases Red Hat staff) about that experience. I am not attempting to give a technical overview of SELinux here. This paper is an evaluation of the implementation of selinux as used by Red Hat and the principles they advise for its use.

This is an older post that was originally published elsewhere in August 2015 So I decided to post a review of my own Dell XPS13 developer edition, supplied running Ubuntu three weeks ago. I'm not going into great detail on the hardware, apart from where it has specific relevance to a Linux install as this has been covered by many reviewers save to say that the screen and its small bezel is a key selling point, as is the ‘Precision’ touchpad. Hardware reviews by other sites include Tech Radar review (Windows version with same hardware) and iFixit Teardown. There are many others.