CentOS and Newer Versions of Python

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

When working on Python development locally on my Arch machine, I am generally either working on Python 3.7 or 3.8. This is usually not an issue since Lambda natively supports Python 3.7. However, on CentOS 7 and 8 the latest version of Python available is 3.6. In order to sanely get Python 3.7 on CentOS I wrote the following little playbook that uses Pyenv to install the version of Python I need on the servers. …

Vagrant, Libvirt, and nftables

Monday, August 17, 2020

Vagrant and libvirt work just fine together when using the standard iptables firewalling, but I wanted to move to the simpler (IMO) nftables. However, getting everything working properly was no simple task, so here is the process of how I got it all to work (finally). …

CentOS 8 Software RAID Monitoring

Sunday, July 5, 2020

My current home server uses software Linux RAID to run my two large RAID arrays. By default, CentOS 8 does not monitor the status of these RAID devices for you. It is highly recommended that you set up the monitoring of your devices lest you forget and have all your data disappear. …

Use JQuery to Write Data to a Variable

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Needed a way to put data pulled from my API (via Django REST Framework) into a variable for graphing. …

Quick API Auth for Flask

Saturday, March 21, 2020

A quick decorator function for api authorization on Flask endpoints …

JSON to Data Object in Python

Friday, February 14, 2020

I recently learned about Class methods. Here is a quick Class method to parse a JSON response into a Data object in Python. …

Quickly deploying Python code to Lambda

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Lambda is pretty awesome, and we use it for a ton of things at work. I’ve deployed around 20 different scripts at this point, that do everything from monitoring type of tasks to a full Slackbot. Although generally we use Ansible to deploy everything (including our Lambda tasks), there are times when things need to go and they need to go now. For this I wrote a simple script that zips up a package that can be manually deployed to Lambda with all the necessary libraries and things your script needs. …

Writing a Custom Model Field for Encryption

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Lately I’ve been learning web development with Django. I have a few projects I’ve been working on and have learned a ton. Something I came across in one of my projects was the need to encrypt fields in the database. Being a DevOps/Security guy I know the whole arguments against and for using encryption on specific database fields. In this case I am storing some usernames and passwords for a site I am scraping, and felt that encryption was better than nothing. I found an article but didn’t like the exact way they were implementing the encryption so I changed it. Below is that implementation: …

drone.io and the GCR

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

For the last week or so I’ve been evaluating drone.io as a replacement for our current CI engine (spoiler: we aren’t going to use it). Something that I ran across that wasn’t immediately obvious on how to achieve was pulling private images from Google Container Repository. Although there is a thread on the Discouse forums that touches on it, I had to do some testing on my own to actually get it working. Here is what I did. …

Keybase

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Yesterday I decided to resurrect my keybase account. For those of you that don’t know what Keybase is, I suggest you check it out. Among also being (another) secure method to chat, they have a unique feature that allows you to verify that you are the person who is behind other accounts and/or websites. For instance, I verified my Github account, so you can be sure that the Github account @binaryronin is actually the same person writing this article (as I also verified this website), and the person you are messaging on Keybase. …