Opening to my video: Screencast 003 - Gitlab

Screencast 003: Gitlab

I’ve done a new mentoring style video, talking about how to use a self-hosted version of Gitlab for basic group projects and individual projects.

Screencast 003: Gitlab

Also available on Archive.org and LBRY.

Late edit 2020-03-25: To build the Gitlab environment I created, take a look at this git repository, which uses Terraform, some cloud init scripts and an ansible playbook. In particular, look at the following files:

If you just want to build the Gitlab environment, then it’s worth removing or renaming (to anything that isn’t .tf – I use .tf_unload) the files load_aws_module.tf, load_awx_module.tf, load_azure_module.tf

Opening to my video: Screencast 002 - A quick walk through Git

Screencast 002: A quick walk through Git (a mentoring style video)

I have done a follow-up Mentoring style video to support my last one. This video shows how to fix some of the issues in Git I came across in my last mentoring video!

Screencast 002: A quick walk through Git

I took some advice from a colleague who noticed that I skipped past a couple of issues with my Git setup, so I re-did them :) I hope this makes sense, and at 35 minutes, is a bit more understandable than the last 1h15 video!

Also on LBRY and Archive.org

Opening to my video: Screencast 001 - Ansible and Inspec using Vagrant

Screencast 001: Ansible and Inspec with Vagrant and Git (a mentoring style video)

If you’ve ever wondered how I use Ansible and Inspec, or wondered why some of my Vagrant files look like they do, well, I want to start recording some “mentor” style videos… You know how, if you were sitting next to someone who’s a mentor to you, and you watch how they build a solution.

The first one was released last night!

I recently saw a video by Chris Hartjes on how he creates his TDD (Test driven development) based PHP projects, and I really wanted to emulate that style, but talking about the things I use.

This was my second attempt at recording a mentoring style video yesterday, the first was shown to the Admin Admin Podcast listeners group on Telegram, and then sacrificed to the demo gods (there were lots of issues in that first video) never to be seen again.

From a tooling perspective, I’m using a remote virtual machine running Ubuntu Mate 18.04 over RDP (to improve performance) with xrdp and Remmina, OBS is running locally to record the content, and I’m using Visual Studio Code, git, Vagrant and Virtualbox, as well as Ansible and Inspec.

Late edit 2020-02-29: Like videos like this, hate YouTube? It’s also on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/JonTheNiceGuyScreencast001

Late edit 2020-03-01: Popey told me about LBRY.tv when I announced this on the Admin Admin Podcast telegram channel, and so I’ve also copied the video to there: https://lbry.tv/@JonTheNiceGuy:b/Screencast001-Ansible-and-Inspec-with-Vagrant:8

One to read/watch: IPsec and IKE Tutorial

Ever been told that IPsec is hard? Maybe you’ve seen it yourself? Well, Paul Wouters and Sowmini Varadhan recently co-delivered a talk at the NetDev conference, and it’s really good.

Sowmini’s and Paul’s slides are available here: https://www.files.netdevconf.org/d/a18e61e734714da59571/

A complete recording of the tutorial is here. Sowmini’s part of the tutorial (which starts first in the video) is quite technically complex, looking at specifically the way that Linux handles the packets through the kernel. I’ve focused more on Paul’s part of the tutorial (starting at 26m23s)… but my interest was piqued from 40m40s when he starts to actually show how “easy” configuration is. There are two quick run throughs of typical host-to-host IPsec and subnet-to-subnet IPsec tunnels.

A key message for me, which previously hadn’t been at all clear in IPsec using {free,libre,open}swan is that they refer to Left and Right as being one party and the other… but the node itself works out if it’s “left” or “right” so the *SAME CONFIG* can be used on both machines. GENIUS.

Also, when you’re looking at the config files, anything prefixed with an @ symbol is something that doesn’t need resolving to something else.

It’s well worth a check-out, and it’s inspired me to take another look at IPsec for my personal VPNs :)

I should note that towards the end, Paul tried to run a selection of demonstrations in Opportunistic Encryption (which basically is a way to enable encryption between two nodes, even if you don’t have a pre-established VPN with them). Because of issues with the conference wifi, plus the fact that what he’s demoing isn’t exactly production-grade yet, it doesn’t really work right, and much of the rest of the video (from around 1h10m) is him trying to show that working while attendees are running through the lab, and having conversations about those labs with the attendees.