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Drone on CoreOS for CI/CD

I’m working on a moving my CI/CD platform to Drone.  As usual, I’m behind a corporate firewall 1. Install CoreOS This is just a standard CoreOS image on OpenStack 2. Configure Proxy

Now update to get latest settings so Docker works

3. Get Drone

4. Register application in your github account. Since […]

Jenkins Spark integration

You can make Jenkins publish messages to spark after or during builds.  Here’s how we do this: 1. Get the spark room ID that you want to use:

This will give you a list of rooms.  From here, you can find the room you want and get the ID of the room: Something like: Y2lzY29zcGFtxuovL3VzL1JPT00vOWRhMjY1MDAtOWY2Zi0xMWU1LTg0ODQtNzczOTMxZTUxMGE3 […]

Using Packer with Cisco Metapod

Packer is such a cool tool for creating images that are used with any cloud provider.  With the same packer recipe you can create common images on AWS, Digital Ocean, OpenStack, and more!  The Packer documentation already comes with an example of running with Metapod (formerly Metacloud). I wanted to show an example of how […]

Getting Started with AWS EMR

AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) is basically a front end to an army of large EC2 instances running hadoop.  The idea is that it gets its data from S3 buckets, runs the jobs, and then stores it back in S3 buckets.  I skimmed through a book on doing it, but didn’t get much out of […]

2014 year in review

2014 was huge for me.  I hope it was a great year for you too.  A few highlights: In July, I achieved the CCIE Datacenter certification.  This came after 4 failed attempts on the written exam and one previous failure on the lab exam.  More information on that is here. In November, I finally got […]

Rails API Testing or “You’ve been doing it wrong”

For the last several years I’ve been developing Ruby on Rails applications.  Nothing fancy, and most of them just failed projects that didn’t go anywhere.  During all this time I’ve trolled documentation on testing the app, saying “That would be nice to do one day”, but I’ve finally had enough and I want to change […]

Installing Cisco DCNM on Red Hat Linux

DCNM is Cisco’s GUI for managing MDS and Nexus products.  It’s pretty great for getting a visual of how things are configured and performing. I thought I would go into a little more detail than I’ve seen posted online about installing DCNM on RedHat Linux.  In this example we’ll be installing two servers.  One server […]

The CCIE Data Center Certification Process

  On July 9th, 2014 I passed the CCIE Data Center lab exam in San Jose earning me the CCIE certification.  Hurray!  When my team heard that I had done it, their response was:  If Vallard can do it, so can I!  Ha ha.  So needless to say a few more people have started down […]

1000v in and out of vCenter

I was setting up the Nexus 1110 (aka: virtual service appliance, aka: VSA) with one of our best customers and as we were doing it the appliance rebooted never to come up again without completely reinstalling the firmware from the remote media.  Most of this was probably my fault because I didn’t follow the docs […]