Category: sysadmin

Exploring UPnP with Python

UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play. It’s a standard for discovering and interacting with services offered by various devices on a network. Common examples include: Discovering, listing and streaming media from media servers Controlling home network routers: e.g. automatic configuration of port forwarding to an internal device such as your Playstation or XBox. In this […]

Alien Deb to RPM convert fails with error: “Use of uninitialized value in split…” [FIXED]

TL;DR: Run alien under the script tool. I was trying to get my build server to build packages for one of my projects. One step involves converting a Debian package to a RPM by means of the Alien tool. Unfortunately it failed with the following error: alien -r -g ansible-cmdb-9.99.deb Warning: alien is not running as root! […]

Ansible-cmdb v1.14: Generate a host overview of Ansible facts.

I’ve just released ansible-cmdb v1.14. Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible’s fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page containing system configuration information. It supports multiple templates and extending information gathered by Ansible with custom data. This release includes the following bugfixes and feature improvements: Look for ansible.cfg and use hostfile setting. html_fancy: […]

Terrible Virtualbox disk performance

For a while I’ve noticed that Virtualbox has terrible performance when install Debian / Ubuntu packages. A little top, iotop and atop research later, and it turns out the culprit is the disk I/O, which is just ludicrously slow. The cause is the fact that Virtualbox doesn’t have “Use host IO cache” turned on by […]

mdpreview, a Markdown previewer to be used with an external editor

There are many Markdown previewers out there, from the simplest commandline tool + webbrowser to full-fledged Markdown IDE’s. I’ve tried quite a few, and I like none of them. I write my Markdown in an external editor (Vim), something very few Markdown previewers take in account. The ones that do are buggy. So I wrote mdpreview, […]

Ansible-cmdb v1.12: Generate a host overview of Ansible facts.

I’ve just released ansible-cmdb v1.12. Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible’s fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page containing system configuration information. It supports multiple templates and extending information gathered by Ansible with custom data. This release includes the following bugfixes and feature improvements: Bugfix: Don’t parse hidden files in fact output […]

Openvas v8 on Ubuntu 14.04: Login failed. OMP service is down

Recently I suddently couldn’t log into Openvas v8 running on Ubuntu 14.04 anymore. Nothing had changed about the machine (as far as I knew), but I got the following message when trying to log in with any account: Login failed. OMP service is down The logs (/var/log/openvas/openvasmd.log) showed the following message: lib serv:WARNING:2016-01-19 15h52.12 utc:21760: […]

Ansible-cmdb v1.10 released

I’ve just released ansible-cmdb v1.10. Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible’s fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page containing system configuration information. It supports multiple templates and extending information gathered by Ansible with custom data. This is a feature and bugfix release, including the following changes: Fix for UTF-8 characters appearing in […]

Introducing ScriptForm: Stand-alone webserver that generates forms to serve as frontends to scripts

I’ve just releases v1.0 of ScriptForm. ScriptForm is a stand-alone webserver that automatically generates forms from JSON to serve as frontends to scripts. It takes a JSON file which contains form definitions, constructs web forms from this JSON and serves these to users over HTTP. The user can select a form and fill it out. When […]

Ansible-cmdb v1.8: Bugfixes and new columns

I’ve just released ansible-cmdb v1.9. Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible’s fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page containing system configuration information. It supports multiple templates and extending information gathered by Ansible with custom data. This is a feature and bugfix release, including the following changes: Always output UTF-8. Added the ‘json’ […]

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