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It seems like every time I try to access the remote console on one of my old DRAC 5's, something fails. The latest failure was kind of new and I didn't find any blog posts specifically discussing it, so I'm writing one. The error was the classic "Error when reading from ssl socket connection". But the usual fixes didn't work.

The title is a bit dramatic, but I'm bad at naming things and that's the name of the project I'm writing about today.

As with many people, I like my todo list to be very low overhead. I don't want a huge task tracking system with all the bells and whistles. Those are for management's benefit. I want a list of things that I need to do and a way to keep track of which ones I've completed. If my todo list has a lot of overhead then I won't use it consistently and it becomes worse than useless because it provides a false sense of security that I'm tracking all the work I need to do. There are a million todo apps out there, but none that I've found were able to satisfy my desire for minimalism.

So I wrote my own (Deja vu much?)

I recently did a system update and a few things quit working. One of them was viewing HTML pages over SFTP. I do this on a fairly regular basis because I have a separate development system where I do a lot of coding work. Part of this is looking at coverage reports that are output in HTML format. It's extremely handy to be able to just fire up Konqueror and view those files directly from the other system. Here's how I fixed it:

About a year ago I got fed up with all the dynamic Zuul status pages (like this one). They're extremely heavyweight pages that make my browser grind almost constantly and there's no way to disable the auto-refresh while you're looking through the list. At least not that I found, and when I asked on openstack-dev the responses agreed.

So I wrote my own.

I have complained extensively over the past couple of years about the over-automation of developer environments in TripleO. But wait, you say, isn't automation a good thing? And yes, it is, but the automation needs to happen in the right places (feel free to append "IMHO" to anything in this post ;-). The problem with a bunch of developer-specific automation is that it hides very real user experience problems because the developers just use their simplified interface and never touch the regular user interface. Essentially it's the opposite of dogfooding, which is something I feel is critical to writing good software. This is also known as the "Works in Devstack" problem for OpenStack as a whole (I will not be tackling that problem here though).

So if I don't like what most people are doing today, what would I prefer? That will be the topic of this post. I'll discuss what I do, and possible areas for improvement.

I was asked to look into integrating Ansible Tower with TripleO a while back. It actually wasn't that difficult to do, but I've finally gotten around to recording a demo video showing how. In this post I will also provide a brief overview of how I installed Ansible Tower.

My laptop has 12 GB of memory and is largely used for web, email, IRC, and ssh to other systems. You might think that would be sufficient. You would be wrong.

If you've been following my blog very closely you might notice it's been up and down occasionally over the past couple of weeks. You may also notice that I mentioned Drupal "fun" in my previous post. This was maybe a bit misleading as it wasn't really Drupal's fault, but Drupal did make it much easier to deal with.

Updated 2018-04-02 with another possible solution

I've been having lots of Drupal "fun" in the past week or two (more on that later), and I finally managed to fix an issue that had been bugging me for a while on a site I had previously migrated from Drupal 6 to 7. Specifically the update.php page was not working. This despite the fact that I was logged in as user 1.

If you've looked at the OVB repo or docs recently you may notice that there have been some significant changes. This is a good news-good news situation: the changes are backwards compatible and if you use the new configuration method it's much easier to deploy with some of the more advanced options in OVB.