Project Alphaberry - Part 6 - The hard parts

Can you believe that yet another few months have passed? A lot of what I planned on working on in Part 5 has been working out really well, but in this post I will be discussing what went well, what isn’t going well, and where the project is at today.

Project Alphaberry - Part 5 - Checkpoint

So here we are, 4 months into Project Alphaberry. At this point, it is time to look back, reflect, and figure out what the next steps are. I have a running system, its pretty cool, and I learned a lot of things along the way, but now, we need to rebuild.

Build My Rig - 2017

So one of my internal hard drives failed last week, and I did the logical thing, and rebuilt most of my system. This post includes all of the parts to build out my current computer rig for 2017-2020?

GitLab - Omnibus Edition

In an attempt to look for a build/deployment pipeline at home, I came upon GitLab, a source control and continuous integration/deployment system. This really appealed to me because my entire home setup was meant to be controlled by automation. GitLab definitely fills a gap, but I ran into a lot of issues, and still have some that are plaguing me.

Docker Purge

There comes a time, when you just want to purge all the docker things from a machine. Over time, you can accumulate a bunch of garbage, and not even really realize it. While playing around at work and at home, I came up with this little script I use pretty often to clear out my working Docker environment on a system.

#!/bin/sh
containers=$(docker ps -a -q)
if [ ! -z "$containers" -a "$containers" != " " ]; then
  echo Stopping $containers
  docker stop $containers
  docker rm $containers
else
  echo No containers running
fi

images=$(docker images -a -q)
if [ ! -z "$images" -a "$images" != " " ]; then
  echo Removing Images $images
  docker rmi $images
else
  echo No images installed
fi

docker volume prune -f
docker network prune -f

This can be used on Linux, Bash for Windows, and even CGWyn. Basically, stop all containers, remove them, remove all images, prune all volumes, and prune all networks.

If you have any improvements to this, let me know down below in the comments!

Project Alphaberry - Part 4

It’s been a few weeks since my last update, and for anyone who follows me on Twitter you would have discovered that my progress is going, albeit slow. Life tends to get in the way of things, and getting through the learning curve of this project, without getting horribly sidetracked, has been a huge challenge, but, I knew this when I started, and I actually love every second of it! I know so much more about linux, networking, ansible, and docker at this point, then I though I could cram into just a few months at this.

Project Alphaberry - Part 3

There was a pause with the Project Alphaberry, I had to do tons of hardware/software planning. You see, I really want to get this right, and have it awesome, however, I am starting to hit that point of diminishing returns where planning and not doing is starting to get in the way.

As of today, enough talking, and on with the builds!

Migrating Old Website - Part 3

In this third part of the migration of my old website, I add even more functionality, as well as clean up some of the code.

One of the largest issues I had with the code overall was that it was pretty noisy. I decided that I would split out the Golang standard logging with the go-logging library. This is a pretty straight forward logger, at work we use a custom logger that integrates into our systems and provided line numbers and package/file names, but I didn’t feel that the extent of that system was neccessary in this, and go-logging is pretty powerful out of the box. The absolute key being, I could change the log verbosity overall of the output, since while doing the import, every action was pushed to the stdout.

Project Alphaberry - Part 2

Well, I started digging into the metal a bit this week. I now have a few linux machines laying around, and the starts of a real server infrastructure. Project Alphaberry continues…

Project Alphaberry - Part 1

As you have seen from recent posts, I am currently writing some software to pull down a lot of the content from my old website. At the same time, I am preparing the new hosting platform, as well as my own little playground, dubbed “Project Alphaberry”. In this first post, I want to talk about the “Alpha”.