Raspberry pi puppet

So, I decided I really wanted to have an easy way to get my raspberry pi images to a somewhat sane state but I did not really want to write shell scripts to do this.

I've been using puppet at work for over a year now and its pretty simple really - most of the time I spend on puppet configs is debugging various isms ( like, for an ssh authorized keys manipulation, you can't throw an array to user :-< )

Planning to test out my image process soon-ish. Still need to get mcollective working properly - think its about the last module still erroring out on me.

So far, I have:

1. ssh configuration
2. various package installations
• rasp-config, ruby-shadow, python-pip, ruby-dev
• ruby packages: builder ( for gem installs ), wiringpi
• pip ( python ) package rpi.gpio
3. rsync backup, just a simple backup to my fileserver
4. /boot/config.txt so I can preserve any modifications I may want
5. locales config
6. user maint, putting my ssh key in place, forcing pi's password to be maintained/not raspberry
7. automate git clone of remote repos
   ( So I don't have to remember to do those by hand though updates/pull will be manual )

Only down side is that I'll still need a bootstrap script to put a few packages on the box - puppet/facter gems and puppet.conf, then I should just need to run puppet agent and everything should magically appear

I may upload the puppet configs to github but most of the configurations are going to be local

puppetlabs dist for arm

W: Failed to fetch http://apt.puppetlabs.com/dists/precise/Release  Unable to find expected entry 'main/binary-armhf/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)

Bummer! I guess I can't use the puppet dist from puppet labs directly :-< May be worth the time to compile/install manually but for now - meh :->

Raspberry Pi 512m model ram

So this is interesting, by default ( at least with AdaFruit's occidentalis 0.2, http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/occidentalis-v0-dot-2 ) I was only seeing the first 256m of the ram.

Looking at the documentation http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt it looks like a simple modification to /boot/config.txt addressed the issue:

gpu_mem_512=8

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           486         56        429          0          9         28
-/+ buffers/cache:         18        467
Swap:           99          0         99

It looks like the kernel actually took 16 meg instead of 8 like I wanted but I'll take it :-> I'm logging in only via ssh so I don't see a reason to waste memory on video output.

I can haz pi!

Well, got my raspberry pi this afternoon. Thankfully, I ordered it before the hurricane hit!

So far, I've almost managed to fry it - off by a pin or two oops!

Oct 30 14:44:31 foo kernel[0]: USB Notification:  The device "XHCI Root Hub USB 2.0 Simulation" @ 0x14000000 has caused an overcurrent condition.  The hub it is attached to has been disabled

Thankfully, apple put in a safeguard to prevent mishaps like that from frying your stuff - at least I hope. I need to check the pi board, now if I can just get the tx/rx of the console cable going :->

Thought on technical documentation

Had an interesting IM exchange with a co-worker:

me: Where is the documentation describing how to get the uid of a server?
co-worker:
co-worker: I emailed it to you
me: Just a thought but email does not count as documentation. Does this exist anywhere in a doc or maybe as a puppet fact?

My co-worker has yet to respond and its been about 15 minutes.

This does raise a very interesting issue. Documentation is very important and it should be in a common location. To me, email just is not documentation - its a heads-up but not documentation.

Am I crazy that I don't like email? In fact, I actually hate it. Its a "necessary evil" but that does not mean someone can send me something and expect that I have added it to my ubermind and will hoard that data away somewhere for eternity including instant recall.

Especially when the way to find out is so freaking simple it should be made in to a puppet fact and culled in to puppet's inventory service ( http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/inventory_service.html and/or http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetdb/1/spec_q_facts.html )

ipmitool -H ipmi_host -U ipmi_user -P ipmi_pass fru | grep 'Board Serial' | awk '{print $4}'
ABC123FGYM

( obviously, those are changed values - use your imagination :-> )

Political donations and effectiveness

So,

I had an interesting thought a few minutes ago regarding an email. This email was requesting a donation towards a given candidate to essentially help throw more advertising up.

So, my question is - just how much benefit do these ads get? I'm sure there is a way to calculate a return on investment somehow right?

Besides that, I think at this point in the elections damn-near everyone knows who they are going to vote for. So really, these donations and ads are for the people who don't yet know who they want to vote for on a given spot. The cost/benefit just seems ... kinda crazy.

Our politicians are spending a large fortune to get/stay in office - OUR money that is. ( our meaning any donations, not public funds of course - that would be illegal :-> )

Something I've griped about for some time while I'm at it. We need term limits on ( all of ) our federal and state positions. No more career politicians - people should jump in to politics for a while and then get on with the rest of their life.

Slow TimeMachine backups on osx lion

So, approx 2 months ago I upgraded my laptop to lion. My backups became noticeably slower - they were slow has hell before but in 10.7 they were just unbelievable. Think system lagging to the point of unusable - that slow or worse.

I did find a good solution: Disable spotlight services.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Considering I never use spotlight to find anything, its just wasted cpu cycles anyway.

My backups now take a small fraction of the time they used to take - few minutes at a time unless I pulled down something big ( think os patches or something )

My laptop ( 2008 macbook pro ) is now usable though I think I'm going to need to replace the fans and am considering replacing the hard drive since its about 5 years old already. Hmmm, ssd? http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-830-MZ-7PC512N-Internal-Laptop/dp/B005T3GPXO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2K5BO82B7593V&colid=1HSSX1GJ9ZT27 or maybe one of the intel drives but I'm thinking of just saving the $400 or so.