Ian Wienand: Debugging puppetmaster with Foreman
This is a little note for anyone trying to get some debugging out of
the puppetmaster when deploying with Foreman.
The trick, much as it is, is that Foreman is running puppet via
Apache; so if you're trying to start a puppet master daemon
outside that it won't be able to bind to port 8140. You thus want to
edit the config file Apache is using to launch puppet
/etc/puppet/rack/config.ru. It's probably pretty obvious what's
happening when you look in there; simply add
ARGV << "--debug"and you will start to get debugging output. One issue is that this goes to syslog (/var/log/messages) by default and is a lot of output; so much so that it might get throttled. Although you can certainly reconfigure your syslog daemon to split out puppet logs, an easier way is to just skip syslog while you're debugging. Don't be fooled by config options; simply add
ARGV << "--logdest" << "/var/log/puppet/puppet-master.debug"to the same file to get the logs going to a separate file. Don't forget to restart Apache so the changes stick.
Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this: 
Today my main machine was down for about 8 hours. Oops.
That meant when I got home, after a long and dull train journey, I received a bunch of mails from various hosts each saying:
There's some exploit code going around that will let you get root on
a range of Linux kernel versions by using a bug in the
perf_event_open() syscall. The fix for this is in 3.2.45
and various other stable updates. As a workaround, until it's in
Debian stable, you can set sysctl
kernel.perf_event_paranoid=2. This blocks the exploit I've
seen, but it is still possible to get around this restriction.
Red Hat has a
A week ago, I made the big step and presented my resignation letter at Google. It was not an easy decision, to leave a good job to pursue a blurry plan that sounds a bit infeasible, but I feel this what I want to do: it's a dream becoming reality.
After the 31st of May, I will become self-employed, working as a freelancer, while travelling around the world. I plan to live with a small budget, working with my laptop from wherever I am, instead of stressing about getting many clients to keep an expensive lifestyle.
I've had the travelling bug for some time, always thinking about my next trip, leaving for the airport just after finishing work, coming back on Monday and going directly to the office. You end up wishing for more vacation days all the time (and I had a fair amount of them). Now, for different reasons I want to spend some time in my old house in Nice, and in Argentina. There was no way I could do that with my current job, and that was the trigger for my decision.
After that, I will come back to Ireland, just to think where my next destination will be. I know this is going to be a great experience, we'll see how well it works!
If you think you -or your employer- might need my services, I'd be more than happy to talk! I'll be concentrating on the kind of work I've been doing at Google and before: finding creative solutions for difficult problems, be it systems administration, or (systems) programming. Think of hiring an SRE for just a few hours or days.
Here you have the slides (in Catalan): 
I would like to suggest that the word unprofessional be struck from the
dictionary and anyone who uses it struck with a dictionary. It is a
word which conveys no useful information or proposal for action, and is thus
nothing but meaningless noise.
The purpose of communication is to adjust another person s process of
cognition. I ve heard it said that all communication is persuasion , which
is quite true you re trying to persuade someone to change what they
think. We can consider the intention and effectiveness of an attempt to
communicate in this light.
What is someone trying to achieve when they label a person or behaviour
unprofessional ? If we re being charitable, we would probably say that
they re trying to highlight that something is bad, or could be better.
However, just stamping our foot and saying bad! isn t enough it s also
important to provide some information that the recipient can act upon.
The problem with the word unprofessional is that it really isn t specific
enough on the subject of what is wrong . Have you ever had someone say
something like, your behaviour yesterday was really unprofessional ?
They re assuming you know what they re talking about and you might well
have a reasonable guess but what if you guess wrong? Should you never do
anything you did yesterday, just in case that particular thing was
unprofessional?
When I ve caught myself thinking, that was unprofessional , of my own
behaviour, or someone else s, I think about what caused me to think that.
Once I drill down into it, I usually come to the conclusion that what I
really meant was, I don t like that . Since I m not paid to like things,
that s pretty much irrelevant as a reason to tell someone not to do
something.
On the occasions when I come up with something more concrete, it is
invariably a more useful expression than unprofessional . Things like, it
frustrates the customer , or it pisses off the person sitting in the next
cube are a much better expression of why something is bad than
unprofessional .
I d encourage everyone to keep a careful watch over themselves and those
around them for use of the word. When you catch yourself saying it (or
thinking it), examine your motives more closely. Whatever the more specific
adjective is, use that instead. If it just comes down to I don t like
that , at the very least say that to the person you re talking to. Don t
try and hang anything grandiose on your personal prejudices. You might come
off as being petty, but at least you ll be honest.
Conrad rolled up a new 
If you updated recently your system to 
after the release is before the release. this week I started to pick up my
RC bug squashing activities again. first results: