Hi, I am struggling to see a fit for Vagrant at the moment, why would you use Vagrant instead of bootstrapping with Knife with the relevant plugins installed and a runlist that gives you the configuration you want? I know I am missing something here because everyone seems to rave about it, but I just haven't got round to really diving in with it. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Will Estes Sent: 27 October 2015 21:44 To: Darragh Ó Héiligh Cc: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? I use vagrant to spin up vm's to do stuff to. On Tuesday, 27 October 2015, 9:41 pm +0000, Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:

Andrew, I'm very interested in this.

How did you get the dev ops role? Or more precisely, how did you get VM's to enable you to learn Shef?

I really really really want to get away from the company I'm working in at the moment. I'm despritly trying to find ways of upskilling. I'm not having much luck unfortunately. Mainly due to a lack of time though.

-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Tuesday 27 October 2015 19:50 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour?

Hi,

Over the last few months I have been working in the UK as a DevOps engineer for a large retail company in the UK. This is my first real DevOps job, but started to get into it before then. I am really excited about the opportunities this could bring to some blind sysadmins who are open enough to change their working practises a bit.

Let's talk about the initial stages I went through. I was given an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on day 1 to work with some build automation servers. Now, this website is sort of ok for confident screen readers to use, but it's not efficient. In the DevOps world, that isn't a problem, because you aren't really expected to use the website to manage the objects in AWS; you manage everything with the AWS API and plug-ins for various tools such as PowerShell, Linux etc.

So now if I want to view AWS instances, I can use PowerShell, or mainly I use Chef's knife commands to get and manage the instances etc. I can start, stop, deploy and manage instances with a single command. I can also script this if I want.

Moving onto configuration management, instead of running lots of GUI tasks or going on a server and running loads of commands, documenting all those steps and configuration into a large document that nobody reads, and is possibly inaccurate, if we use a configuration manager like Chef to do the work for us, then we don't need to go on the servers at all. Instead of RDPing into a server, configuring IIS, etc., I can write a Chef recipe that will do all this for me, and apply dev practises to this, such as storing the recipe in a version control system, so we all have a definitive knowledge of which is the latest version of the file. Why bother writing a recipe that actually goes through installing IIS, when I can just go and pick up an IIS recipe that someone has already written and is validated by the rest of the Chef community; programmers have been doing this for years. In case anyone thinks that this is too hard, here is an example Chef recipe that sets up a base in IIS for a website:

# Cookbook Name:: My-Website # Recipe:: default

# Install IIS and the ASP.Net 4.5 module to serve pages. include_recipe 'iis::mod_aspnet45'

#Remove the default site as we want our new site to be served from the root. include_recipe 'iis::remove_default_site'

# Create the website storage folder. directory 'D:/Websites/MySite do recursive true action :create end

#Create application pool for the site. iis_pool 'MySitePool' do runtime_version "4.0" action [:add,:start] end

#Create the actual site that runs from the root of the URL. iis_site 'MySite' do path 'D:/Websites/Ranging' application_pool "RangingPool" action [:add,:start] end

I know I am only a beginner, and there is a lot of progress to be made certainly in Windows and the DevOps world, but I think people should be really excited about the benefits this technology could offer blind people.

Thanks. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

-- Will Estes westes575@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Hi, I am struggling to see a fit for Vagrant at the moment, why would you use Vagrant instead of bootstrapping with Knife with the relevant plugins installed and a runlist that gives you the configuration you want? I know I am missing something here because everyone seems to rave about it, but I just haven't got round to really diving in with it. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Will Estes Sent: 27 October 2015 21:44 To: Darragh Ó Héiligh Cc: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? I use vagrant to spin up vm's to do stuff to. On Tuesday, 27 October 2015, 9:41 pm +0000, Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:

Andrew, I'm very interested in this.

How did you get the dev ops role? Or more precisely, how did you get VM's to enable you to learn Shef?

I really really really want to get away from the company I'm working in at the moment. I'm despritly trying to find ways of upskilling. I'm not having much luck unfortunately. Mainly due to a lack of time though.

-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Tuesday 27 October 2015 19:50 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour?

Hi,

Over the last few months I have been working in the UK as a DevOps engineer for a large retail company in the UK. This is my first real DevOps job, but started to get into it before then. I am really excited about the opportunities this could bring to some blind sysadmins who are open enough to change their working practises a bit.

Let's talk about the initial stages I went through. I was given an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on day 1 to work with some build automation servers. Now, this website is sort of ok for confident screen readers to use, but it's not efficient. In the DevOps world, that isn't a problem, because you aren't really expected to use the website to manage the objects in AWS; you manage everything with the AWS API and plug-ins for various tools such as PowerShell, Linux etc.

So now if I want to view AWS instances, I can use PowerShell, or mainly I use Chef's knife commands to get and manage the instances etc. I can start, stop, deploy and manage instances with a single command. I can also script this if I want.

Moving onto configuration management, instead of running lots of GUI tasks or going on a server and running loads of commands, documenting all those steps and configuration into a large document that nobody reads, and is possibly inaccurate, if we use a configuration manager like Chef to do the work for us, then we don't need to go on the servers at all. Instead of RDPing into a server, configuring IIS, etc., I can write a Chef recipe that will do all this for me, and apply dev practises to this, such as storing the recipe in a version control system, so we all have a definitive knowledge of which is the latest version of the file. Why bother writing a recipe that actually goes through installing IIS, when I can just go and pick up an IIS recipe that someone has already written and is validated by the rest of the Chef community; programmers have been doing this for years. In case anyone thinks that this is too hard, here is an example Chef recipe that sets up a base in IIS for a website:

# Cookbook Name:: My-Website # Recipe:: default

# Install IIS and the ASP.Net 4.5 module to serve pages. include_recipe 'iis::mod_aspnet45'

#Remove the default site as we want our new site to be served from the root. include_recipe 'iis::remove_default_site'

# Create the website storage folder. directory 'D:/Websites/MySite do recursive true action :create end

#Create application pool for the site. iis_pool 'MySitePool' do runtime_version "4.0" action [:add,:start] end

#Create the actual site that runs from the root of the URL. iis_site 'MySite' do path 'D:/Websites/Ranging' application_pool "RangingPool" action [:add,:start] end

I know I am only a beginner, and there is a lot of progress to be made certainly in Windows and the DevOps world, but I think people should be really excited about the benefits this technology could offer blind people.

Thanks. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

-- Will Estes westes575@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Hi, Not going into too much detail on the list but pretty much I have had the last 3 months to play around with VMs and environments, and that is what has caused me to do a lot of the learning. If you want to start with Chef the tutorials on the site are really good to start off with, and you can use hosted Chef so you don't have to spin up a Chef server. I used my own VMs in AWS, but you can do it from home with Hyper-V or similar so long as the network can get out to the hosted Chef servers. I have been pretty much off Chef for the last few weeks as I have been trying to do .net build stuff using open source tools like Jenkins etc which has been a real challenge, but I want to start writing my Chef recipes using test deiven development which is my next big hit list task I want to get done. The other thing of course is I am free and single which isn't ideal for me but while I am in this situation I am trying to make the best of it. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Darragh Ó Héiligh Sent: 27 October 2015 21:41 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? Andrew, I'm very interested in this. How did you get the dev ops role? Or more precisely, how did you get VM's to enable you to learn Shef? I really really really want to get away from the company I'm working in at the moment. I'm despritly trying to find ways of upskilling. I'm not having much luck unfortunately. Mainly due to a lack of time though. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Tuesday 27 October 2015 19:50 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? Hi, Over the last few months I have been working in the UK as a DevOps engineer for a large retail company in the UK. This is my first real DevOps job, but started to get into it before then. I am really excited about the opportunities this could bring to some blind sysadmins who are open enough to change their working practises a bit. Let's talk about the initial stages I went through. I was given an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on day 1 to work with some build automation servers. Now, this website is sort of ok for confident screen readers to use, but it's not efficient. In the DevOps world, that isn't a problem, because you aren't really expected to use the website to manage the objects in AWS; you manage everything with the AWS API and plug-ins for various tools such as PowerShell, Linux etc. So now if I want to view AWS instances, I can use PowerShell, or mainly I use Chef's knife commands to get and manage the instances etc. I can start, stop, deploy and manage instances with a single command. I can also script this if I want. Moving onto configuration management, instead of running lots of GUI tasks or going on a server and running loads of commands, documenting all those steps and configuration into a large document that nobody reads, and is possibly inaccurate, if we use a configuration manager like Chef to do the work for us, then we don't need to go on the servers at all. Instead of RDPing into a server, configuring IIS, etc., I can write a Chef recipe that will do all this for me, and apply dev practises to this, such as storing the recipe in a version control system, so we all have a definitive knowledge of which is the latest version of the file. Why bother writing a recipe that actually goes through installing IIS, when I can just go and pick up an IIS recipe that someone has already written and is validated by the rest of the Chef community; programmers have been doing this for years. In case anyone thinks that this is too hard, here is an example Chef recipe that sets up a base in IIS for a website: # Cookbook Name:: My-Website # Recipe:: default # Install IIS and the ASP.Net 4.5 module to serve pages. include_recipe 'iis::mod_aspnet45' #Remove the default site as we want our new site to be served from the root. include_recipe 'iis::remove_default_site' # Create the website storage folder. directory 'D:/Websites/MySite do recursive true action :create end #Create application pool for the site. iis_pool 'MySitePool' do runtime_version "4.0" action [:add,:start] end #Create the actual site that runs from the root of the URL. iis_site 'MySite' do path 'D:/Websites/Ranging' application_pool "RangingPool" action [:add,:start] end I know I am only a beginner, and there is a lot of progress to be made certainly in Windows and the DevOps world, but I think people should be really excited about the benefits this technology could offer blind people. Thanks. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Just curious, is anyone trying this stuff with Azure? I have an MSDN subscription through work and get $150 worth of Azure credit each month as part of that, so if I was going to explore that’s probably the backend I would use as its free for me. Just wondering if there’s a reason people are going with AWS or if its just that its the leader right now. I’ve spun up VMs in Azure, and the web site is pretty accessible, if a little bulky. There’s a complete Powershell interface too that I’ve played with some but not a ton. And I know Azure has a lot of services beyond VMs, I’ve really not even figured out what all they do but it seems like there’s some cool stuff in there. Ryan

On Oct 27, 2015, at 8:11 PM, Kelly Prescott wrote:

If I might put in my $0.02 worth. It is relatively inexpensive to use AWS for practice. First, there is a free teer, and while it is not going to do much for you, you can certainly spin up machines to practice with. I have done most of my extra learning this way. I spin up a machine, am charged for the hours it runs, and then shut it down. I usually have several shutdown machines in my profile. The only thing they cost while shutdown is the disk space which is not a lot. This gives me the opportunity to work with large machines and installations that I could not do on my own.

On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:

...

Andrew, I'm very interested in this.

---

Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Kelly: I’ve not done it, but if you want you can either create a blank VM or use any VHD file you have. I’ve found the templates to be good enough for the basic playing I’ve done so haven’t gone through that process. Ryan

On Oct 27, 2015, at 9:55 PM, Kelly Prescott wrote:

When I looked at it, there was a limited set of images to choose from. I can use what ever images I want with AWS or even make my own. I could be wrong about Azure, but that is how I understood what I read.

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, Ryan Shugart wrote:

...

Just curious, is anyone trying this stuff with Azure? I have an MSDN subscription through work and get $150 worth of Azure credit each month as part of that, so if I was going to explore that’s probably the backend I would use as its free for me. Just wondering if there’s a reason people are going with AWS or if its just that its the leader right now. I’ve spun up VMs in Azure, and the web site is pretty accessible, if a little bulky. There’s a complete Powershell interface too that I’ve played with some but not a ton. And I know Azure has a lot of services beyond VMs, I’ve really not even figured out what all they do but it seems like there’s some cool stuff in there. Ryan

...

On Oct 27, 2015, at 8:11 PM, Kelly Prescott wrote:

If I might put in my $0.02 worth. It is relatively inexpensive to use AWS for practice. First, there is a free teer, and while it is not going to do much for you, you can certainly spin up machines to practice with. I have done most of my extra learning this way. I spin up a machine, am charged for the hours it runs, and then shut it down. I usually have several shutdown machines in my profile. The only thing they cost while shutdown is the disk space which is not a lot. This gives me the opportunity to work with large machines and installations that I could not do on my own.

On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:

...

Andrew, I'm very interested in this.

---

Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

---

Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Hi, Azure will be fine. To start off with you could just deploy a Windows VM, and then as long as it can talk to the hosted Chef servers, it will be ok to manually bootstrap the node. You can then look into the Azure Knife plugin to do automatic bootstraps. I just used AWS because that is what the company is using, but as per yesterday they provided me an MSDN account with the same benefits, so I may start using it at home. One thing though to be careful of is your MSDN administrator can pool Azure resources like this so just because you have an MSDN subscription doesn't mean you will be able to get the credits. I need to check the status with my subscription. Andrew. ________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] on behalf of Ryan Shugart [rshugart@ryanshugart.com] Sent: 28 October 2015 03:04 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? Just curious, is anyone trying this stuff with Azure? I have an MSDN subscription through work and get $150 worth of Azure credit each month as part of that, so if I was going to explore that’s probably the backend I would use as its free for me. Just wondering if there’s a reason people are going with AWS or if its just that its the leader right now. I’ve spun up VMs in Azure, and the web site is pretty accessible, if a little bulky. There’s a complete Powershell interface too that I’ve played with some but not a ton. And I know Azure has a lot of services beyond VMs, I’ve really not even figured out what all they do but it seems like there’s some cool stuff in there. Ryan

On Oct 27, 2015, at 8:11 PM, Kelly Prescott wrote:

If I might put in my $0.02 worth. It is relatively inexpensive to use AWS for practice. First, there is a free teer, and while it is not going to do much for you, you can certainly spin up machines to practice with. I have done most of my extra learning this way. I spin up a machine, am charged for the hours it runs, and then shut it down. I usually have several shutdown machines in my profile. The only thing they cost while shutdown is the disk space which is not a lot. This gives me the opportunity to work with large machines and installations that I could not do on my own.

On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:

...

Andrew, I'm very interested in this.

---

Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Hi, Yes, DSC resources are pretty much similar to Chef, in fact you can use DSC resources in Chef as well of PowerShell scripts. Where I like Chef is the fact that you can store the configuration recipes centrally for many platforms and systems, and it acts as a central server to get configuration items onto a server. I tried running this through DSC and running a DSC server is a painful process at the moment. I think this will change with the new Service Management stuff that will come out in the next months, but at present I am finding the best way of delivering DSC is through Chef. Andrew. ________________________________________ From: Blind-sysadmins [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] on behalf of Ryan Shugart [rshugart@ryanshugart.com] Sent: 27 October 2015 23:45 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? This all sounds very exciting, where I work our web services team is playing some with Cheff and I know they’re liking it a lot. I’m starting to play more with Powershell workflows and DSC in the latest Powershell, which I think could do much the same thing but haven’t had enough time to mess enough to be sure. One of our consultants told me Microsoft is coming out with a new product called Service Management Automation which will eventually replace System Center Orchestrator (which is totally inaccessible today) with Powershell workflows which is why I’m looking into that more. If you are mainly a Windows admin, you need to know Powershell, I don’t care if you’re blind or sighted. But especially if you’re blind. Ryan Ryan

On Oct 27, 2015, at 1:49 PM, Andrew Hodgson wrote:

Hi,

Over the last few months I have been working in the UK as a DevOps engineer for a large retail company in the UK. This is my first real DevOps job, but started to get into it before then. I am really excited about the opportunities this could bring to some blind sysadmins who are open enough to change their working practises a bit.

Let’s talk about the initial stages I went through. I was given an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on day 1 to work with some build automation servers. Now, this website is sort of ok for confident screen readers to use, but it’s not efficient. In the DevOps world, that isn’t a problem, because you aren’t really expected to use the website to manage the objects in AWS; you manage everything with the AWS API and plug-ins for various tools such as PowerShell, Linux etc.

So now if I want to view AWS instances, I can use PowerShell, or mainly I use Chef’s knife commands to get and manage the instances etc. I can start, stop, deploy and manage instances with a single command. I can also script this if I want.

Moving onto configuration management, instead of running lots of GUI tasks or going on a server and running loads of commands, documenting all those steps and configuration into a large document that nobody reads, and is possibly inaccurate, if we use a configuration manager like Chef to do the work for us, then we don’t need to go on the servers at all. Instead of RDPing into a server, configuring IIS, etc., I can write a Chef recipe that will do all this for me, and apply dev practises to this, such as storing the recipe in a version control system, so we all have a definitive knowledge of which is the latest version of the file. Why bother writing a recipe that actually goes through installing IIS, when I can just go and pick up an IIS recipe that someone has already written and is validated by the rest of the Chef community; programmers have been doing this for years. In case anyone thinks that this is too hard, here is an example Chef recipe that sets up a base in IIS for a website:

# Cookbook Name:: My-Website # Recipe:: default

# Install IIS and the ASP.Net 4.5 module to serve pages. include_recipe 'iis::mod_aspnet45'

#Remove the default site as we want our new site to be served from the root. include_recipe 'iis::remove_default_site'

# Create the website storage folder. directory 'D:/Websites/MySite do recursive true action :create end

#Create application pool for the site. iis_pool 'MySitePool' do runtime_version "4.0" action [:add,:start] end

#Create the actual site that runs from the root of the URL. iis_site 'MySite' do path 'D:/Websites/Ranging' application_pool "RangingPool" action [:add,:start] end

I know I am only a beginner, and there is a lot of progress to be made certainly in Windows and the DevOps world, but I think people should be really excited about the benefits this technology could offer blind people.

Thanks. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins