Thomas H Jones II articles - 70 total
Implementing (Psuedo) Profiles in Git (Part 2!)
As noted in my first Implementing (Psuedo) Profiles in Git post: I'm an automation consultant for...
Keeping It Clean: EKS and `kubectl` Configuration
Previously, I was worried about, "how do I make it so that kubectl can talk to my EKS clusters". ...
So You Work in Private VPCs and Want CLI Access to Your Linux EC2s?
Most of the AWS projects I work on, both currently and historically, have deployed most, if not all,...
ACTUALLY Deleting Emails in gSuite/gMail
Each month, I archive all the contents of my main gSuite account to a third-party repository. I do...
TIL: I Am Probably Going To Come To Hate `fapolicyd`
One of the things I do in my role is write security automation. Part of that requires testing...
Crib Notes: Assuming a Role
Several of my current customers leverage AWS IAM's role-assumption capability. In particular, one of...
Why Prompt Uncomfortable Questions
I do automation work for a number of enterprise customers. Each of these customers deploys Red Hat...
Code Explainer: Regex and Backrefs in Ansible Code
Recently, I'd submitted a code-update to a customer-project I was working on. I tend to write very...
Dense Coding and Code Explainers
My role with my employer is frequently best described as "smoke jumper". That is, a given project...
Hop, Skip and a Jump
A few weeks ago, I got assigned to a new project. Like a lot of my work, it's fully remote. Unlike...
What Permissions Do I Need
In recent months, I've been converting some automation I originally wrote under CloudFormation to...
Working Around Errors Caused By Poorly-Built AMIs (Networking Edition)
Over the past several years, the team I work on created a set of provisioning-automation tools that...
Increasing Verbosity of Ansible Jobs
Sometimes, Ansible doesn't have really native methods for installing and/or configuring some types of...
Smashing Walls of Text
On a few projects I work on, we make use of Ansible to automate system-configuration tasks. For bette...
Implementing (Psuedo) Profiles in Git
I'm an automation consultant for an IT contracting company. Using git is a daily part of my work-life...
Sometimes The (Workable) Answer Is Too Simple to See
One of the tasks I was asked to tackle was helping the team I'm working with move their (Python and A...
Opinions on Company-Paid Training and Payback Periods
I recently found out that a friend was leaving his old position for a new one. That friend had been w...
Taming the CUDA (Pt. II)
So, today, finally had a chance to implement in Ansible what I'd learned in Taming the CUDA. Given...
Taming the CUDA
Recently, I was placed on a new contract supporting a data science project. I'm not doing any real da...
TIL: Podman Cleanup
Recently, I started working on a gig that uses Ansible for their build-automation tasks. While I have...
Ansible Journey: Adding /etc/fstab Entries
As noted in yesterday's post, I'm working on a new customer-project. One of the automation-tools this...
TIL: You Gotta Be Explicit
Started working on a new contract, recently. This particular customer makes use of S3FS. To be honest...
But We Want a Pre-Authentication Consent Banner!
My primary client-base is security- and compliance-focussed. As part of this, they follow security gu...
Punishing Network Performance
Recently, I took delivery of a new laptop. My old laptop was rolling up on five years old, was still...
Crib Notes: Finding Missing Single- Or Double-Quote Pairs
So, today, was writing a BASH utility. As per normal, I have a commit-time check that runs it through...
Hold On A Second There, Partner
One of the devs on project many of us work on was excited to announce that we'd topped 2000 commits...
Seriously Jenkins^H^H^H^H I Already Used That
A number of months ago, I delivered a set of CloudFormation templates an Jenkins pipelines to drive t...
Seriously, Jenkins?
Have I used that title before? I feel like I ask that question a lot when writing pipelines for Jenki...
The Punishment of NFS on Hardened EL7 Systems
All of the customers I currently serve operate under two, main requirements: If...
Are there things you see in others' code that just automatically makes you twitch/shudder
I'll admit that I'm a shite coder. That said, there's stuff I see that always makes me shiver when I...