After contributing some small build problem fixes for gitlab-ci-multi-runner and two of it’s dependencies, I’ve made it possible to run CI builds from Gitlab on OpenBSD. The following instructions will help you set it up yourself.

For work we required the use of a VPN for a number of Mac OS X laptops to an OpenBSD 5.6 router. I have a strong preference to use the base tools available on every install of OpenBSD and Mac OS X, so I choose to configure L2TP using npppd(8) over IPSec with pre-shared keys, using isakmpd(8) with an ipsec.conf(5).

For a masterless Puppet setup I use to configure my personal computers, I was in need of a way to cleanup all my inline file declarations.

A few days ago I discoved OpenBSD’s spamd(8). Apparently I’ve always confused it with SpamAssassin’s daemon, which is also called spamd. OpenBSD’s spamd is a lot more light weight than SpamAsssasin, but it’s tactics to fight spam are fairly effective. I’ll explain how it works below.

Using a trick documented here, I switched this server from Linux to OpenBSD, without a support installation method for OpenBSD from my ISP. In the original article, the author created a VM disk image and installed OpenBSD in it. The server was then rebooted into rescue mode (from a LiveCD) and the VM was uploaded and written to disk using dd. I modified the documented method a bit to speed up the process.

With only a few days left till the official support period of Windows XP comes to an end, I was amazed by these two head-lines (via).

A few weeks back I purchased Pro Puppet for my Kindle (paperback version). I had been using Puppet before, but reading this book gave me more insight in how to use Puppet and made me start using Puppet again.

When considering to build a high availability cluster based on Linux, it’s easy to find all kinds of how-to’s explaining the basic tooling and configuration. Most of them forget to explain some of the basic concepts of high availability. In this post I’ll try to explain them.

A lot of Ruby on Rails developers install Ruby by using RVM or rbenv. Most of the time this is because their operating system of choice comes without an up-to-date Ruby version. For example, Debian 7 ships Ruby 1.9.3 and Mac OS 10.8 shipped with 1.8.7. Tools like RVM or rbenv can be used to install a newer version in the users own home-directory. These tools use shims to “trick” gem and bundle into using the users own version instead of the system version. I’ve always found this to be a rather messy solution and luckily you don’t need it on OpenBSD.

The author of the following link went through great lengths (literally) to make sure you understand the size of the universe around us. I advise you no to do the actual scrolling on an iPad…

» If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel