Learn tech-related stuff

  • Git repo and Visual Studio 2017

    When using Git as the source control system within Visual Studio, if you use a different location to create your local repos than the default it can be a pain to amend it each time. This post will show how the default repo location can be updated… The default location for Git repos in Visual…

  • Ansible – Part 1

    Ansible is one of several tools that can be used for configuration management, this post provides some notes on the various roles that Ansible can perform as well as how it works. For an introduction to Puppet, take a look at my post – “Puppet – Introduction“. So, what is Ansible – what does it…

  • *nix – check disk space

    If you’ve tried to use ls -lh to get the size of a directory and it’s content, you’ll have found that it doesn’t give you what you were hoping for. One method to get the size of a directory, including files, sub-directories and their files is to use du (disk usage). du -sch The switches…

  • More user admin in *nix

    Following on from a much earlier post about user administration in Solaris, I have found a few other tasks that may be fairly common requirements. To change a users login nameusermod -l <new username> <old username>e.g. usermod -l john.knight john.knoght “-l” tells usermod that we want to amend the login name. This is useful if,…

  • Rename logical & physical MSSQL files

    This post will provide guidance on how to amend the logical and physical file names of a MSSQL database. When a copy of a database is restored as a new database, the logical file names will remain the same as the source database. Firstly, check the current logical and physical file names: USE master GO…

  • SnipIT No 7: Change colour when using “ls”

    SnipIT is a series of short blogs containing useful information in an easily digestible format. Listing the files and directories in a PuTTY session when connected to Red Hat recently, I realised how bad the contrast is between the default dark blue on black. To change this to something more usable, we can edit the…

  • Puppet – Introduction

    Puppet – Introduction Puppet is a configuration management tool which can be help to address the following challenges: Deploying servers with a consistent configuration. Addressing inconsistent configurations (config drift). Application deployment. Automation – as part of CI & CD, get it down faster! Before the likes of Puppet and Chef, SysOps typically would have a…

  • Docker and Containers: The Big Picture

    These are my notes from Nigel Poulton’s course on PluralSight, “Docker and Containers: The Big Picture“. Do check out his videos, he’s an easy guy to listen to and explains the subject matter in a digestible manner. Yo can also follow him on Twitter – @nigelpoulton What are containers? Hypervisor Takes slice of physical server…

  • Removing objects

    This is a useful feature of Photoshop. There are two phases in removing an object from an image: The removal of the object Filling the area left by the removed object 1 – The removal of the object Selecting the Rectangular Marquee tool. Creating a marquee (click and drag action) around the object that is to…

  • Black and white conversion

    Black and white conversion may be required when producing black & white printed material or to provide an ageing effect. Choosing the Image -> Duplicate menu item. Using the Duplicate Image dialog box. Entering a name for the duplicate image to be created. Using the duplicate image we are ready to convert it to black…

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