There, I said it! Containers won’t fix every application, they won’t replace your server farm, and sadly they won’t do your laundry.
Someone needed to say something in this world of marketing buzzwords and hype machines. “I volunteer as tribute.”
I work with a lot of container tools and platforms, and I have to say the technologies are fantastic! However, I was a SysAdmin for about a decade and worked in the MidWest to boot. (I say that because technology in the United States seems to start on the coasts and works its way to the middle of the country.)
Containers DO serve a great purpose: they isolate a running application into isolation and only give access to host resources that are absolutely necessary.
Containers DO make it easy to try out new technologies and applications. My home lab runs several web hosting tools (like WordPress and Hugo), gaming platforms, and home automation tools. To figure out which ones I liked best, I could spin up a basic image with a couple of commands.
Containers DO allow you to create applications that are self-healing, that can be deployed through automated pipelines, and provide for a dense application population.
However…
Containers DON’T replace the operating system. Guess what? The code running in containers is still Linux (and some are a few Windows images too). The orchestrator or operating system running underneath your container… an OS! The only question is how deeply that OS is obfuscated away.
Containers DON’T have a migration path like P2V (physical-to-virtual) did in the dawn of virtualization.
Containers AREN’T designed to absorb your 100GB legacy application that runs on an antiquated code base.
However…again…
I will say container technologies have come a long way in the last few years. The routes to production have become much more straightforward and more opinionated.
Container technologies are no longer the Wild West. So, while containers may not be a one-size-fits-all solution like the hype machine would have you believe, I do think there are a growing number of use cases.
I picture a long highway that stretches past the horizon. Each exit is a different stopping-off point for an individual workload. For instance:
Exit 1) Maybe you are a small business with a web server, a sales portal, and a backend database. Do you really need a 6-node Kubernetes cluster hosted on a cloud provider? I’d say not.
In this scenario, running a single server (with automated backups, of course) and running your workloads in a series of Podman pods would make sense.
Exit 2) At some point, you decide you want to start adding features to your sales application. Now, you may add 2 or 3 more servers to serve as Dev and QA environments.
This exit is a little more crowded, but you can still get by with managing your container infrastructure by hand.
Exit 8A) Let’s say your small sales company expands at a rapid and unanticipated rate. Your 3-4 pods with a couple of containers each are now at over a hundred pods with multiple containers each. You have measurable ebbs and flows of traffic throughout the day.
Do you really want to run each pod by hand? Do you really want your applications to run at peak capacity at 3 AM when you get no traffic to your web properties?
Now we start talking about container orchestration. Now we start discussing bringing in Kubernetes. Now you can build each of dozens of components by yourself, or you can look at the next exit:
Exit 8B) Each cloud provider has their own managed (read opinionated) implementation of Kubernetes, where all the hard decisions are made for you.
All your operations teams have to do is spin them up, instantiate some users, and start deploying (grossly over-simplified, but you get the idea).
In fact, my company, Red Hat, has one of the coolest (in this dude’s opinion) container platforms out there: OpenShift!
While I am just a Linux SysAdmin at heart, I can genuinely appreciate what containers and platforms like Kubernetes and OpenShift are trying to accomplish.
I host a live stream on Twitch and YouTube to talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This next week, January 11th, we’re having some of the OpenShift team on to talk about running virtual machines on their platform! (See the comments for the link.)
I am in love with containers; my home lab lives by them. I believe it is necessary to take a realistic approach to move into the container space. One size does not fit all.
——
Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece of my own making. It is neither sponsored nor commissioned by Red Hat.
IT operations folks strive to not only maximize uptime but also keep systems patched. These might seem like competing goals, but we’re here to help with Live kernel patching in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and enjoy some improvements with live kernel patching in RHEL 8.5.
You can use a built-in tool to get update the kernel on RHEL systems with no downtime. That tool is live kernel patching (kpatch). Kpatch has been a part of our operating system for some time now (since RHEL 8.1, 7.7). However, with RHEL 8.5 (and the 9.0 Beta), there are some significant enhancements.
To catch the rest of my article, head over to the Red Hat blog here!
Way back in the day, humanity created computers to help make our lives easier. In a lot of ways, they have; in others, it’s made life much more tedious, especially for the SysAdmin. What used to be a mainframe has turned into hundreds of servers, containers, and virtual machines spread across data centers, clouds, and even laptops!
Never fear, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is here. Tools like Ansible have been around for over a decade or more but in the past few years they have really picked up speed. Ansible is a simple, efficient approach to automating and standardizing our environments while cutting down on the time, increasing reliability, and removing the human error factor from operations and deployments!
My Story
Probably around 2012 or so, I was a rookie Linux Systems Administrator just making the move away from managing Windows servers and desktops. I remember how much fun patch days were…at first. We got to take the morning off, spend an evening at our off-site data center, order in some Jimmy John’s, and once the corporate office closed, start patching systems. We ran CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Enterprise, and maybe even an Ubuntu system or two.
Looking back, it was actually an unnecessary time suck! Why!? Patch a couple of hundred servers, by hand, rebooting systems manually, and hoping that nothing broke because the application and database administrators were already at home enjoying the end of their workday. The one saving grace at that point was Tmux (an amazing tool to manage multiple terminal sessions at once). At least then I didn’t have to type yum update 200 times!
I guess Charles Dickens might have said of my career: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” I finally got to focus on Linux Servers, bye-bye Windows, but who wants to spend their Thursday nights patching a couple of hundred servers by hand?
That’s not why you’re here, though. You all know I have my SysAdmin scars and I wear them with pride because now, I get to share amazing lessons I learned (or in today’s case should have learned back then). Today, I want to introduce a tool that could have taken our patching times from 6-7 hours down to what could have been less than an hour. Even more, that process could have been completely automated!
What is Ansible?
Ansible is a project bred from the idea that all infrastructure (even security, networking, and cloud) should be code. In other words, if you think of your lab, network, enterprise, whatever as a restaurant, Ansible would be the recipes the cooks used to make every dish. Ansible is written predominantly in Python and utilizes YAML or “YAML Ain’t Markup Language” (who doesn’t love a good recursive acronym?) for its playbooks.
Ansible, not to be confused with the Red Hat product Ansible Automation Platform, is an open-source project that runs across most Linux and Unix systems as well as Mac and Windows and even networking gear, clouds, and security appliances! The list of modules and supported platforms grows with every release.
The name was inspired by Rocannon’s World, a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the 1966 novel, ansible was a fictional, instantaneous communication system. Ansible would later become the name of the open-source tool. Michael DeHann, the original developer decided to build a company around his new tool and with the help of Said Ziouani and Timothy Gerald founded AnsibleWorks Inc. Later, the company was renamed Ansible Inc and eventually was acquired by Red Hat in 2015.
Why Ansible?
Ansible burst onto the field in an age where Infrastructure As Code (IaC) tools seemed to be everywhere. However, Ansible had a few attributes that set it apart from its competition.
For one, Ansible is agent-less. In other words, there is no software to deploy across your enterprise. You could install the Ansible package on your laptop and manage thousands of servers across bare metal, virtual machines, and even the cloud!
Being agentless also opened the door for another advantage: Ansible utilizes OpenSSH to execute remote commands instead of proprietary or platform-specific tools.
Thirdly, Ansible set itself apart by choosing simple, YAML-based text files to define its environments and code. Want to have a pre-defined list of servers to manage? Add it to an inventory file! Want to use Ansible to create a user, set its password, and add an SSH key? Write a playbook. Want to have support for different environments (dev, prod, etc.)? Easy, just create a variable file!
Getting Started
Did I sell you on how easy and awesome Ansible is? Good, because here is the entrée for today’s meal: Let’s install Ansible and use Ansible to add a package on our local system. For the sake of this demonstration, I’ll be using one of my favorite server distros, Fedora Server, specifically Fedora 34. Ansible is available for most major distros, so, consult your package manager to find the correct package.
The first step is to install the required Ansible package and its dependencies:
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ sudo dnf install -y ansible
Last metadata expiration check: 0:05:30 ago on Tue 22 Jun 2021 04:13:57 PM CDT.
Dependencies resolved.
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================
Package Architecture Version Repository Size
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
ansible noarch 2.9.21-1.fc34 updates 15 M
Installing dependencies:
libsodium x86_64 1.0.18-7.fc34 fedora 165 k
python3-babel noarch 2.9.1-1.fc34 updates 5.8 M
python3-bcrypt x86_64 3.1.7-7.fc34 fedora 44 k
python3-cffi x86_64 1.14.5-1.fc34 fedora 244 k
python3-chardet noarch 4.0.0-1.fc34 fedora 214 k
python3-cryptography x86_64 3.4.6-1.fc34 fedora 1.4 M
python3-idna noarch 2.10-3.fc34 fedora 99 k
python3-jinja2 noarch 2.11.3-1.fc34 fedora 493 k
python3-jmespath noarch 0.10.0-1.fc34 updates 46 k
python3-markupsafe x86_64 1.1.1-10.fc34 fedora 32 k
python3-ntlm-auth noarch 1.5.0-2.fc34 fedora 53 k
python3-ply noarch 3.11-11.fc34 fedora 103 k
python3-pycparser noarch 2.20-3.fc34 fedora 126 k
python3-pynacl x86_64 1.4.0-2.fc34 fedora 110 k
python3-pysocks noarch 1.7.1-8.fc34 fedora 35 k
python3-pytz noarch 2021.1-2.fc34 fedora 49 k
python3-pyyaml x86_64 5.4.1-2.fc34 fedora 194 k
python3-requests noarch 2.25.1-1.fc34 fedora 114 k
python3-requests_ntlm noarch 1.1.0-14.fc34 fedora 18 k
python3-urllib3 noarch 1.25.10-4.fc34 fedora 175 k
python3-xmltodict noarch 0.12.0-11.fc34 fedora 23 k
sshpass x86_64 1.09-1.fc34 fedora 27 k
Installing weak dependencies:
python3-paramiko noarch 2.7.2-4.fc34 fedora 287 k
python3-pyasn1 noarch 0.4.8-4.fc34 fedora 133 k
python3-winrm noarch 0.4.1-2.fc34 fedora 79 k
Transaction Summary
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================
Install 26 Packages
Total download size: 25 M
Installed size: 143 M
Downloading Packages:
<<< Output Truncated >>>
Complete!
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$
Excellent, feel the power yet? Let’s get a little crazy. Let’s write a playbook. Let’s install a package!
I really like htop. It is a “graphical” tool that, in this author’s opinion, makes it much easier to read and understand the output of the top command.
Luckily, it’s available from the default Fedora repos. So, using your favorite text editor, create htop.yml:
What’s all this mean? Let’s break it down line by line. Make sure to start your playbook with three hyphens (-), then name tags are just that, it lets you know what task is being run to make it easier to understand the output (and especially troubleshoot any problems). Next, we have the hosts. For this super-simple example, we are only calling localhost. This could also call any number of hostnames or groups listed in an inventory file. Become is basically your sudo command. If you set Become to yes, Ansible will run with administrative privileges. Otherwise, the playbook will run as whatever user calls the playbook.
Under tasks, we have another name tag. We are calling the package module. This is what is so cool about Ansible; you can actually build playbooks that will run over differing distributions! The package module is intuitive enough to know what your system’s package manager is: apt for Ubuntu, yum for CentOS, dnf for Fedora, and so on. Next, we call the package, in our case, htop. The final line is the state of the package. We can set this to a specific version, to absent (if we don’t want the called package installed), or latest, which (you guessed it!) means the package will be on the latest version.
Now, save your config file, and let’s run our playbook:
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ rpm -qa|grep htop
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ ansible-playbook htop.yml
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'
PLAY [installing packages] ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [install htop] *******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ rpm -qa|grep htop
htop-3.0.5-4.fc34.x86_64
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$
You can see htop is not installed before we run our playbook, then after we run it, htop is indeed present!
Wrap Up
So, there you have it. You now have the power to go out and install a package on any SSH-enabled host system. Go forth and blow people’s minds! When you take this simple example and zoom out, you start to see the sheer power that Ansible can bring to a Systems Administrator. Step aside, Luke Skywalker, we don’t need the Force anymore to move your X-Wing. We’ll do it with Ansible!
Okay…That may be over the top. However, I can’t overstate the truth: Build out your playbooks. Grow your Ansible skills. The rule is, if you have to do a task more than once: AUTOMATE IT! Stop installing packages by hand. Quit wasting your time bootstrapping servers by copy-pasting commands out of a shared document. Take those commands, add in some Jinja-variable goodness, and let computers do what they were meant to do: make the lives of humans easier.
Like a terrible TV infomercial, just wait, there’s more! Have a favorite open source project you like or a system service that you tend to modify? You may not even have to start from scratch! Ansible has galaxies (pun intended) of pre-built roles and playbooks available. Ansible Galaxy is a community-driven effort to provide pre-built code to get your systems up and running fast. They have playbooks for Nextcloud Server, LAMP, and even desktop applications!
I use Ansible every time I build out a new VM. I use Ansible to ensure my user account is configured exactly the same way across all my systems: laptop, desktop, server, VMs, and cloud! Admittedly, my list of Ansible To-Dos is still fairly large, however, I try to spend a little time each month adding to it. Slowly but surely, I am automating and standardizing my home lab and home production systems. You can too!
Let me know below how you are or are planning to use Ansible.
Did you like this post? Let me know in the comments if there is more you’d like to read on this topic. There is SO much more we could talk about from products like Red Hat’s Ansible Tower (or the upstream AWX project) to large-scale use cases, bootstrapping, and more. So, by all means, let me know what you are interested in.
Thank you so much for spending your valuable time to hear my “war stories” and letting me share a tool with you I am quite passionate about.
(This post originally appeared here and is used with permission.)
The approach to work has changed several times over the past three or so years. We all keep hoping to find that “new normal,” and I think we are in it already. At least for now, our new normal will be abnormal.
It’s funny now; it wasn’t then: In early March 2020, I had just gotten back from a team meeting in New York. I was going to be home for a week before embarking on some amazing trips: I was going to finish my sales training in Raleigh; I was going to a telecommunications conference in Chicago; I was going to attend a sales meeting in Texas. Three weeks, three trips…except I didn’t go anywhere!
During that week between trips, the organizers canceled all three. In a matter of four hours or so, The world shut down. I didn’t even leave my state until Summit 2022 in Boston! That was an experience to share in a different blog post. The trip that struck me was a couple of weeks after Summit when the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team met at one of our offices for a week-long strategy session.
At that time, I had been at Red Hat for 2 1/2 years and was a marketing team member for a week shy of a year. I hadn’t met any of my coworkers in person during that time! Let’s be honest, we were there for the strategy sessions, but most of us made the trip for the human connection!
Importance of In-Person
Before the pandemic, I’d had work-from-home days and had been part of remote workforces before I came to Red Hat. I was an all-remote employee before the pandemic. It’s one thing if everyone is remote; it is a mess if you have a hybrid audience.
Before Red Hat, I worked for GitLab, a company that prides itself on being globally distributed. I felt my team of Solutions Architects had a winning pattern: asynchronous communication, regular 1-on-1s, and weekly team meetings. My favorite part then was that we met in person once a quarter. This balance allowed us to maximize working from home while maintaining regular communication with our team. The in-person meetings allowed us to strategize, whiteboard, or grab a drink with the coworkers we spend hours with weekly.
I missed that balance during the pandemic. I think, though, we are moving back in that direction.
Hybrid Meetings
Anyway, back to Boston and the in-person strategy session. We spent the first morning meeting everyone and discussing our plans for the future of RHEL. The difficulty was we had well over 25 people in the room and almost as many on a Google Meet!
Here’s where this blog gets informative: It took us the better part of a day to get most of the bugs worked out. We realized that there were some crucial factors to take into consideration:
1) Keep the room quiet. Anytime a bag would open or someone would fidget through their notebook, it would be annoying to those in the room. But to those hearing everything through earbuds, it was downright awful!
2) Ensure remote attendees can participate. It is effortless to be ignored or for your attention to drift when you are one of the few not on site. We were using Meet for our meeting. It had some beneficial features:
The “raise hand” function allowed people to signal their interest in contributing to the discussion. The raise hand tool even included a queue so people could address their comments in the order they were received.
We found something new: Google Meet had a “companion mode”. For people in the room, we could join the meeting, use the raise hand tool, and be put into a chat room. Side conversations (or, in our case, humorous tangents) are an unavoidable part of meetings, so, at least in the chat room, these conversations were quiet (see point 1 above) and recorded right along with the meeting video!
Something else we ended up doing was ensuring that someone on the remote call got to present or lead group discussions. The giant floating head effect was a little much, but hey, what can you do.
Though, we also realized that it’s still easy to do group breakouts with hybrid meetings. When we would assign people to functional breakouts or ice breakers, the virtual room became one of the groups.
3) Utilize virtual whiteboards or flow charts! Yeah, I know, it’s not as good as everyone circled a physical whiteboard. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by several of the tools we used! There was Miro for virtual whiteboarding and collaboration. We also used Jamboard to do more free-form thinking and capture ideas.
Wrap up
Hybrid isn’t ideal. Nothing beats being in person for strategy sessions, whiteboarding, and building team spirit! Giving a hug (I’m a huge hugger) or a handshake is the best. However, it’s not always possible with family, health concerns, and logistics.
I am very thankful that we live in a society that accepts and acknowledges that fact. We have the right and the support of others to exercise our decisions. While I still have some anxiety around travel, I enjoy it more, knowing it is my choice.
Nowadays, I’m even safer traveling than I was before. I got bronchitis and a sinus infection on a flight right before a cruise! Now, I have a mask with me at all times. If I feel like some folks around me are less than healthy, I can put it on and rest easier.
These are just some thoughts I had after traveling for the first time in several years. These are just a few lessons our team picked up from our first hybrid meeting. I’d love to hear what has worked for you!
Before coming to Red Hat, I spent nearly a decade as a Systems Administrator. After all that time, I’m still continually discovering tools that would make life as a SysAdmin much easier. One of these utilities is the redhat-support-tool. In this post, we’ll walk you through using the tool in some real-world scenarios.
What is the Red Hat support tool?
The support tool allows you to interact with the Red Hat knowledge base, support tickets, analyze log files, and even set site-wide configuration options, all from the command line! At first glance, that may not seem like a big deal but consider these real-world scenarios.
Want to catch the rest of this post? Head over to the Red Hat blog!
From creating technical labs, blogs, and videos to pairing customers’ problems with product features, technical marketers never see a dull moment.
Slide-deck builder, swag folks, booth dwellers, buzzword people… technical marketing gets a bad rap sometimes. Today, I want to set the record straight. Marketing can be a chaotic, challenging, yet rewarding space to work in… and there’s also some swag involved.
I’ve held several different roles before finding my home as a technical marketing manager (TMM), including support engineer, systems administrator, and solutions architect (technical sales), to name a few. None of those roles quite brought me the thrill and fulfillment that my current position does. What does a TMM do day-to-day? What skills and tools do you use? What traits do you need to succeed?
Want to catch the rest of this article? Head on over to the Enable Sysadmin blog!
These days it can be overwhelming to select the best software to use because now more than ever, choices are abundant when it comes to software. Messaging and Communications apps are a great example of that because there are so many options out there. What if you’re looking for a messaging app that is scaleable and privacy-focused? It can be even harder.
Thanks to the Element team, I’ve got a great option to show you. Element, previously known as Riot.im, is a cross-platform client that works on the Matrix protocol. What does that mean? Is Neo the One? Well, let’s talk about the protocol and why you should consider using this great messaging platform.
What Is Matrix?
The Matrix team describes it as an “open standard for secure, de-centralized, real-time communication”. First, it’s open-source, more eyes equals better code. We all know how much I love open source…but for the uninitiated, that means more people can read and study the code, security vulnerabilities can be found and fixed faster, and other projects and contributors can build effective integrations into the source project.
Second, it’s decentralized. This is a little more complicated, but think of it this way, when you stand up an instance of a decentralized application, that is your space. This could be for a family, a meetup, or a company. Everything would be self-contained until you make your instance discoverable. At that point, you@yourhomeserver.com can reach out into the world and find say friend@anotherserver.com.
Thirdly, Matrix supports real-time communications. This includes collaboration, messaging, voice, and even video! Matrix provides a series of encryption algorithms and bridges to facilitate end-user applications to communicate with one another. You may use Etherpad for real-time collaborative document editing, Jitsi for video conferencing, and in today’s blog post, Element for messaging.
Some of the most popular bridges for Matrix are IRC and Gitter. The Open Source Community jumps in with some of their own too, including Telegram and Google Hangouts.
Matrix enables the communications between these platforms within an instance or throughout the interconnected network of Matrix instances across the Internet.
What is Element?
If Matrix is the network, then the Element client is the vehicle that allows you to traverse that network; Element is the interface for text, voice, and video conversations. Just like the Matrix protocol, the Element client is completely open-source!
With the ability to bridge between different apps like Slack right into the Element interface, you no longer need to install and maintain a dozen different apps just to keep in touch with friends, family, work, your volunteer group, your work’s other chat client…you get the idea.
Create an account, activate the needed integrations, and chat with anyone, anywhere on any number of different platforms. Enjoy a 1:1 conversation or hundreds of participants in public rooms.
Bonus: One of my favorite features? Notifications management. I can have every notification from every room, set it to only being notified if I am tagged, or never get any notifications…ever. But Element didn’t stop there, nope, they have one of my favorite notification settings I have ever seen: keyword notifications.
Let’s say I want to know any time someone is talking about dogs. I can add keywords to my configuration and get notified anytime someone says dog, dogs, cats drool, you get the idea!
Element has the option to join the central server at Matrix.org, host your own instance on your own server, or pay a monthly fee for a secure, hosted option. In fact, from their website, you can get up to 5 active users a month for as little as $2/month (USD).
Creating Your Account
It’s now time for you to enter the Matrix and get into your Element. See what I did there? Alright, to get started you will need to create an account. One of the best things about Element is that you can use it on all sorts of devices like your laptop, tablet, phone, or whatever.
For this guide, I’m going to show you how to do it on the Web client in your browser. So open up your favorite browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, and navigate to https://app.element.io.
Your browser will likely ask you to allow access to persistent storage. Accept it that way Element can store your keys, messages, etc. Next, we are going to create an account.
We could create our account on Matrix.Org, but here is a little pro tip: The central server in a federation usually is over-taxed and prone to lag. So, if you know of another public-facing instance, that would be a good bet.
Lucky for us, the community has some awesome members that manage LinuxDelta.com, a community-driven hub for information on Linux distributions, tutorials, and a Matrix server! Instead of using the Matrix.Org option, we are going to go to Advanced/Other:
In the ‘Homeserver URL’ field, type in: https://matrix.linuxdelta.com and click on the green next button. Next, it’s time to create a username. The username will be your display name as well so keep this in mind as you decide. This is what people will see you responding as and how they can tag or search for you! Then create a password, make sure it’s complex. No sense in skimping on security especially if you are utilizing a password manager, like Bitwarden for instance.
Me personally, I am a content creator and a community advocate. I want to be found in the open-source community, so, I would add an email so people can look me up via email. If you do, you’ll of course be sent the customary email confirmation link. For now, though, let’s go ahead and sign in.
Once you have filled in your username, password, and email go ahead and click the green Register button!
This next step is tricky but stay with me. One of the advantages of Element we discussed was end-to-end encryption. We need to generate a Security Key (that is different from our password!). I typically recommend using a system-generated key. Then you can use a secure note somewhere to store the key.
Disclaimer – I changed the security key after writing this blog post, so, don’t think you can get into my account that easily. 😀
Once you’ve saved your key somewhere safe, go ahead and enable notifications and read through some of Element’s recent announcements.
Getting Connected
You are sitting with a brand new, secured account. Now what? Well, Element is a communication platform, let’s find some people to communicate with!
In the middle of the window, there is the option to “Explore Public Rooms”. Let’s click there. Element will default to your home instance, in this case, LinuxDelta.com.
Get connected to The Geek Lab, for instance, by clicking join. That will put you in touch with hundreds of other technology enthusiasts like yourself who hang out, chat, and help each other fix technical problems.
Want to get connected to the broader world? Go back to the Explore button, next to the search bar. In the window we saw before, we have the option to create a new room or select a different server. Let’s hop over to Matrix.org.
There are literally thousands of public rooms covering a crazy number of different topics. Many open-source projects have communities on Matrix. There are HAM radio enthusiasts, D&D (Dungeon and Dragon) hangouts, and even region-focused rooms.
The join process is exactly the same though for a different server, just find a room you want, click join, and start chatting.
There is plenty more to do and discover. From 1 on 1 conversation, adding bridges, and initiating video calls. However, for now, that is all the deeper we will go!
Closing Thoughts
You may be surprised to hear that this is not paid content. I wrote this because I believe in Element. I believe that Matrix is going to have a HUGE part to play in the years to come. There are SO many (read too many) apps to keep track of. Many of them have ads or tracking built-in, or are limited to voice or text. Element, powered by Matrix, has it all. The integrations keep getting better. More and more bridges keep getting built (no pun intended, okay, maybe a little pun).
Open Source is the key. E2E (End to End Encryption) will ensure that your private conversations stay private… You know, I haven’t even mentioned the beautiful interface or that the Element Team releases new features on a frequent basis.
So go sign up and give Element & the Matrix protocol a try! When you get your account registered, be sure to look me up: itguyeric@one.ems.host
(This article was originally posted here and is used and updated with permission.)
I was recently asked, “Why call yourself the IT Guy? Why not just use your name?” Great question! In the professional world, we are encouraged to “build a professional brand,” I just took it to an entirely different level.
There were a few minor reasons. One of which is privacy. I initially didn’t want my full name publicized all over the Internet. However, I eventually realized that anyone that wanted to figure out who I was badly enough could follow the breadcrumbs to LinkedIn.
Linux Unplugged
Another more humorous reason was that I used to hang out regularly on Linux Unplugged, a live podcast that features a Mumble room for guests to jump on and be a part of the hosts’ discussion. When I first joined, I was “erich1527”. Little did I know that there was an Erich who worked with an open-source project and frequently came to hang out on the show as well. Having two Eric’s made it confusing for the host!
When the IT Guy was born, I worked full-time as a Systems Administrator and part-time trying to start my own IT Consulting company in the Kansas City area. Granted, the consulting business withered away as life changed, kids came into the picture, and priorities shifted. However, it gave me the branding I wanted to create!
I had a client at the time who had me handling an office move. When I walked in the day of the move, the lady behind the front desk leaned into the main conference room and, to her boss, said, “Hey the IT Guy is here.” I was hooked!
I loved how simple the name was: “Eric the IT Guy”. It was generic but appropriate. The IT Guy could be any of us who deal a lot with technology and trying to get it to work. (Obviously, some of you might have to be the IT Gal…but I digress.)
I had colleagues in the technology space who helped me find a voice. I borrowed equipment from them, recorded sample episodes, started appearing on podcasts as The IT Guy. It stuck. It felt right!
When I realized that the brand was working, I was at a DevOps conference here in Kansas City. I introduced myself as Eric, sporting my GitLab work t-shirt at the time. The dude I was chatting with said, “Wait. Eric…Eric…The IT Guy?” My response was a huge smile and “The one and only!”
Previous Recording Space
Some of you may laugh at the name Eric the IT Guy, but hey, it works. As the IT Guy, I try to help educate my fellow technologists. I try to bring exciting technologies to the forefront. I try to teach methodologies and techniques that can save you time and trouble that I dealt with as a Systems Administrator.
Do you need to give yourself some cool nickname or create a personal logo? Probably not. Do you need to network, build connections, and share your knowledge? Most definitely!
If you aren’t sure how to grow your network, you can start by adding me! I am just about everywhere as @itguyeric. Find me, let’s chat; that’s all it takes to get started! One person, one conversation.
For me, it’s meetings, household chores, ongoing projects, random lists, IMs, Emails, forum posts, social media (yeah, believe it!), whew. For years, I tried different tools and methods for tracking my to-dos. I was pretty good at it… Most of the time. It seemed like now and then, though, I would hit a breaking point and all the plates I had been juggling would fall to the floor, and I’d have to start over again.
Enter Todoist, a product which boasts you can “regain clarity and calmness by getting all those tasks out of your head and onto your to-do list (no matter where you are or what device you use).” To say that Todoist is a to-do list or even a project management application would be a gross understatement. Over the past few years, I have managed to shift from an anxious task tracker to a productivity power user.
I work a demanding job in a challenging field, host a podcast, a live stream, have a wife, four wonderful kids, and a few hobbies. Add on top of that the need to sleep, work out, and get things done around our house. I don’t say that to impress you. We are all busy. It’s a challenge. What I plan to unleash into your minds is a series of tools and methods I use every day to get everything done. We’ll cover Todoist, email management, ways to focus on tasks (like me trying to write this blog post), and much, much more.
Grab your caffeine and hold on tight. Here we go!
Why use a to-do list?
“I don’t need a to-do list. I have that list in my head.”
Pleeeaaase. No you don’t! We live in a world of CRAZY connectivity! Everything is always on all the time. Tweets, news, sports, YouTube, podcasts…and that’s just a short list only from the digital world! Many of us have multiple devices within a few feet of our favorite chair that spend their time lighting up, dinging, buzzing, and ringing. Attention spans and deep work are at an all-time low.
“So what, I can multitask.”
Sorry, Charlie! That’s a common misconception. What you are really doing is context switching. The more alike tasks are, the easier it is to switch between the two in a short space of time and with little productivity penalty. However, if you go from following a lively instant messaging thread about plastic versus metal dice for tabletop games to working on a 3-year business plan, you aren’t giving either your full attention.
Not only are you not giving either task your full attention, but you are also draining your limited energies for the day. You’re shifting gears between two very different tasks. That comes with a tax and lowers the quality of the finished product. We try to compensate for this by starting several tasks at once, then getting nothing done. Then, as inevitably happens to me, your youngest daughter bursts into your room and grabs your iPad off your desk! By the time you get her setup with her afternoon activity and get back to work, those 3 or 4 or 5 tasks have all fallen and shattered all over the floor. Now, you have to spend wasted time trying to pick up where you left off with each task!
“Eric, tell me there is a better way!”
Fear not, my young apprentices. There is a better way! To-do lists. Ta-da! That’s it. You’re welcome.
Oh, wait… You want to know which one? Okay, I got you. Sorry, I dropped the mic too soon.
How I found Todoist
I used to be stuck on Microsoft Outlook 2003. It had a decent task tracker… You could schedule tasks, set reminders, and eventually could even set tasks to repeat. It was okay. Eventually, I moved to Apple Tasks. It wasn’t as feature rich as it is today, but it got the job done and as a bonus synced to my mobile device. I’d also tried out Trello, but at the time couldn’t quite get a handle on how to use a task board (stay tuned, wink wink!). I also tried organizing projects into MS Project in college (yeah, I was that nerd), eventually projects moved into Evernote, and later Joplin.
Tasks and projects though are two different beasts entirely, but they are also connected! What I found I needed was a way to do both, preferably in the same tool. I needed to be able to do scheduling, track progress, and and and… My list of needs seemed to keep getting longer, how could any tool stand up to that!?
A friend of mine told me about this tool with a weird sounding name: Todoist. To-Do List without the L, clever, huh?
I had my doubts and, if I am being honest, was just looking for excuses not to use it. Strike 1 it’s not open source, strike 2 it’s a paid, cloud service. I told my friend this wasn’t looking good.
UI Screenshot, Todoist.com
However, I begrudgingly created an account, and what I found surprised me. It had a simple-yet-beautiful user interface (UI), incredibly intuitive layout, and many of the features I felt I needed out of a task management tool. I can remember setting aside my work for the rest of the afternoon; I needed to give this tool a proper test drive. A few hours later, I was sold, literally, I signed up for the Pro subscription right then and there.
I could set reminders, recurring tasks, could set labels or organize by project. I had a Today view, that really helped, so I didn’t see EVERYTHING I needed to do, just wanted I wanted to get through that day. Not only that, but I had multiple levels of tasks (projects, sections, tasks, sub-tasks, and priorities).
It didn’t stop there, though! Since becoming a Todoist customer, they have introduced Kanban boards. Now, instead of sections just being a “subproject”, I could use Agile practices to track my work across their typical life cycle, say from idea to outline, draft, edit, and ready to publish. I could set up email aliases for each of my projects, that way, when someone emailed me a task to complete, I could hit forward, add in some metadata, and hit send. Within a couple of minutes, that task was also captured by my Todoist.
Todoist released Calendar integration. This made it much easier to judge how much work I had to get done. The average work day for me ranges from 30 minutes of meetings, up to 6 hours some days. (Yeah, tell me about it! That’s a lot of meetings.) The problem was, those meeting heavy days I may try to schedule my usual 8-10 tasks and get only a couple of them done. Well, I don’t want meetings to break my streak!! No way! So, I started creating tasks for meetings. Attend a meeting, mark off a task. It kept the streak alive, but also helped me plan better – more meetings, fewer tasks scheduled that day.
Getting Tasks Organized
Like many, many human beings, I sat there that first afternoon, staring at this blank canvas. Now what? I can create anything, schedule it any time, what do I do!?
Eric’s Project List
After a brief battle with the void, I started out by creating projects for each major area of my life and color-coding them similar to my different calendar accounts I was already using: Personal (Blue), Work (Red), and General Tech (Green). For the most part, several years later, I still use roughly that same layout, though I have added a couple more top-level projects. For instance, I eventually added my content creation efforts like the Sudo Show and this blog to their own project.
The next easiest thing to do was to go into Apple Tasks and grab all the tasks I had stashed away in there. Take out the trash, submit a time sheet, etc. Short, recurring tasks were the first to come over. Put them in the right project, give them a due date, and move on to the next task.
The harder migration (at first) was how do I break up the projects on my plate and put them into Todoist? Fortunately, Todoist had me covered. Each project has sections. So, underneath my work project, I have a section for general tasks, for each of the engineering teams I support, meetings, and one for the live stream I host every other week.
I could then add my old projects as tasks inside each of these sections. From there, I learned how to break up a large task (like a podcast episode) into sub-tasks from researching the topic, writing the outline, following up with the guest, and eventually releasing the episode. This made it easy to break off bite-sized chunks of a task and get a little progress done each day! (Incredibly beneficial when you release a new episode every two weeks!)
While I was able to migrate a LOT of my ideas, tasks, and projects in the first couple of days, my approach to project planning, task execution, and idea tracking have evolved over the years. I’ll share more on that in a later post. Nowadays, I get between 10-15 tasks done a day. I have my paper notebook open every meeting to jot down thoughts or ideas, but I also have Todoist open somewhere (phone, tablet, web, or app) to make sure I grab any action items that I need to address. I constantly filter through my emails, ensuring nothing gets asked of me there. Anytime I get an IM with a request, into Todoist it goes!
Why Choose Todoist Brake Down (Graphic provided by Crazy Egg)
Want to get started?
I would highly encourage you to get started with Todoist. It’s an amazing tool fueled by a company of folks who are passionate about helping you get more done. They have frequent releases that improve performance, squash bugs, and are still adding new features! They’re used by Apple, NASA, and folks from all different walks of life.
Disclaimer: This link is an affiliate link. If you purchase a Todoist subscription, I get a small percentage. That being said, I would be greatly appreciative of you using my link as anything I make from it is set aside to be reinvested into my content creation efforts (gear, hosting, etc.).
My Reading List
Before you go, I wanted to drop one more idea into your lap: From the screenshots, you’ll notice an orange project called Reading List. Todoist is a great place to drop books, blogs, and white papers!
I have a recurring task to check my RSS feed for any articles that have been published from my list of sources. I probably get about 40+ articles delivered to my RSS reader every day and read probably 25% of them from top to bottom. That can stack up if I don’t keep up with it.
I also do a TON of research between work, the podcast, and my own curiosity. White papers, data sheets, etc. are a hugely popular way to share content these days. Fortunately, Todoist has me covered there too. Todoist supports attachments! If I have a market research report to review, I’ll download it out of my email and drop it in a task and assign a date, that way I am certain I get to it.
Finally, there is my backlog of 60-some-odd books that has been accumulating over the years, from fiction to marketing to parenting. Todoist has even helped me knock that list down from 90 to 60 in the past year or so. When someone recommends me a book, I grab the link from the Kindle website and create a task for it. When I start a new book, I create a sub-task for every chapter. Then, I schedule one chapter a day each workday until that book is complete. The last chapter marks the book task complete, and I move on to the next book!
To keep things interesting, I usually pull a book from each category in my list, then start back at the top. I hope one day to only have a handful of books in this project, but considering my appetite for learning, I doubt it!
Wrap Up
Over the past couple of years, my productivity has skyrocketed! I feel confident I can manage a wide array of tasks on a wide range of projects and still keep my sanity.
Todoist now has a hand in: meeting tracking, household chores, my reading list, podcast and content planning, social media scheduling, and learning. I track tasks from keeping my daily food log to changing the water filter every 2 months, to reminding me to renew that one subscription each year that requires manually requesting a renewal. I haven’t even begun working with a lot of the integrations available in Todoist!
One thing I hope to implement soon is ensuring that recreation and disconnect time become scheduled, recurring tasks in my Todoist so that I can keep the momentum going. Whether that is a day to turn off all my notifications and rest or take the kids to the park. It’s easy to get caught up in all the demands of this world and forget what is truly important: love, joy, fun, family.
Take this journey with me. If you are struggling, learn from my mistakes and my victories. I highly recommend Todoist, but it’s not the only tool out there. Find one that works for you, and let it help you make a difference in your life and in the lives of those around you!
I have loved video games my entire life. I got started on a Super Nintendo playing Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Kart. That was the start of my #nerdlife. Haha!
It was great to sit down with Matt and talk D&D and play Terminator as part of my prep for a podcast. Not very often can you say leveling up is part of your show prep.
On this episode of Game Sphere I get the chance to talk with Eric from the Sudo Show. We talk a bit of DND and then we get into talking about Terminator Salvation and our first impressions of it after playing for a few hours.
We tend to associate free with good. That’s not the case though when what is free is unauthorized root-level access to your Linux systems! On January 26, 2021, a vulnerability, CVE-2021-3156, was disclosed that affects just about every Linux or Unix distribution that utilizes the sudo functionality.
TLDR: You need to update your operating system as soon as possible to ensure you have the patch.
Now that you have scheduled emergency patching windows for all your impacted systems . . . you did right? Let’s get into how this vulnerability works and what the potential impact is.
On a healthy system, you have to run a su command and provide the root password or have your account authorized in the /etc/sudoers file to gain administrative level access to a Linux system. The Baron Samedit bug, however, utilizes a buffer overflow in the Sudo logic to allow a non-privileged account to bypass this security mechanism and run commands with root-level privileges.
While running a sudo command in shell mode (either with the -s or -i argument), special characters must be escaped with a backslash / character. With this vulnerability, however, you can add an extra backslash to any command. This will cause sudo to skip the policy review step where it reads /etc/sudoers to ensure the executing account has sudo privileges. Now with ill-gotten access to root-level privileges, a bad actor could do anything to a compromised system.
You can test this for yourself by logging into a Linux system with a non-privileged account and running:
$ sudoedit -s /
If the prompt returns sudoedit: your system is vulnerable and needs to be patched. However, if your system returns a usage description, your system has been patched and is no longer susceptible to this attack.
sudoedit returns useage on patched system
This vulnerability was discovered by independent testing by Qualys Inc. an information security and compliance company. Their research found that Baron Samedit was actually introduced in version 1.8.2 released, get this, 10 years ago! This bug has been in the wild for almost a decade! It impacts legacy versions 1.8
Rarely do we see a bug with such a wide pool of targets. Sudo is utilized in Unix and Linux systems everywhere. This impacts popular distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and so on. Even BSD and other Unix derivatives are not immune to CVE-2021-3145. The risk of any bad actor gaining root-level rights to your systems cannot be overstated. Once running as root, your system can become a slave to botnets, used for crypto-mining, or exploited to retrieve sensitive data.
the above table lists the packages containing the patch in the most popular distributions
If you would like to read more about Baron Samedit and the deeper, technical explanation of how this vulnerability was found and how it works, Qualys published an in-depth blog on their findings: CVE-2021-3156: Heap-Based Buffer Overflow in Sudo
You maybe wondering the same thing I was . . . Where in the world did Qualys get the name Baron Samedit? Turns out, it’s a play on sudoedit and Baron Samedi. According to Voodoo mythology, Baron Samedi is the Loa (god) of the Dead. He is a chaotic spirit who spends his time smoking, drinking, and well possessing others. This ‘spirit’ even attempts to ensnare everyone’s favorite secret agent, James Bond.
Baron Samedi from Live and Let Die
Just like 007, we need to overcome this new foe, Baron Samedit. Patch your systems…
Rocco was one of the people I instantly connected with in the open source community. His values and his love of the people in open source really resonated with me. Rocco really helped encourage me while finding my own voice.
We talked a LOT on this episode! We covered things from gaming to conferences to announcing the launch of the Sudo Show podcast!
In today’s episode of Linux Spotlight, I get to sit down with my friend Eric The IT Guy. Eric has been in the IT field for awhile and currently works for RedHat. We talk about his history in Linux, his job, Linux conferences and his new podcast called the “Sudo Show”.
I have some very exciting news to share with you all!
My name is Eric The IT Guy and I am a recovering Systems Administrator! I have over 11 years of IT experience ranging from Systems Administration and Engineering to technical sales and community advocacy, most recently, as a Sales Solutions Architect at Red Hat.
My mission as the IT Guy is to fight against burnout and poor work life balance. My goal is to promote methodologies and communities around DevOps and Open Source as well asn an endless supply of fun gibberish along the way. I have worked under all the cliche’d IT cultures – from nightmare on-calls to constant firefighting to teams that are as closed minded as the software they use. I’ve learned a lot from my more-than-a-decade of experience. I hope to share those stories and the lessons I learned with all of you to help make your lives and your organizations better.
Now with that said, here’s the news:
I am very excited to announce that I have joined the Destination Linux Network! If you’ve not heard of DLN . . . where have you been? It’s okay, I’ll just tell you. The Destination Linux Network is a media network powered by Linux and Open Source with a focus on bringing quality content to our audience to help you learn and enjoy the awesome technologies that we all have available.
On DLN, I’ll be one of the hosts of the Sudo Show podcast which will be your place for all things enterprise open source. As I said, I’ll be ONE of the hosts and joining me is Brandon Johnson, a fellow Red Hatter . . . oh did I mention I work at Red Hat? The Sudo Show is going to be an awesome podcast covering careers in IT, productivity, and enterprise technology. If you are just getting started or a seasoned veteran looking to “keep up” then you will certainly want to subscribe to the show! You can get our content on the DLN YouTube Channel or subscribe to the audio version wherever you get your podcasts.
In addition to the Sudo Show, I’m joining the team at Front Page Linux. I will be writing articles at Front Page Linux Dot Com; these will cover topics like avoiding burnout, ways to boost productivity, and how to impact your companies’ culture for the better.
Last but not least, we get to my Youtube Channel. I will be releasing periodic Vlogs there for more random content like an inside look at my experiences as a Solutions Architect.
I am excited to be joining such an awesome community. If you’d like to get in touch, just shoot an email over to Contact@Sudo.Show. You can follow me @ITGuyEric on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Mastodon…just to name a few.
I can’t wait to get started, our first release is June 25th. I look forward to sharing my experiences with you and especially getting your feedback!
I spent over seven years in IT before I really started to understand the breadth of the industry. Technology gets a bad rap for being such a deep field but not necessarily a broad one. In fact, when I was attending college in 2009… Hold the phone… I graduated from DeVry University A DECADE ago! When did that happen!? Ugh, nothing like a personal revelation in the middle of a blog post. Any-who…the career advice I was given was there were two paths in front of me, eventually they would lead to: 1) becoming an architect, the system-designing ninja guru of a major enterprise or 2) becoming CIO of a major enterprise. Said another way, either you go the technical track or the manager track. It wasn’t ever really explained to me there were forks in those roads. Quite a few of them really! (In fact, a funny aside was that my the advisor for the first college I attended told me I wouldn’t ever be successful in IT because my higher math grades like Calculus, Trigonometry, etc. weren’t good enough. Jokes on them!)
While I am making light of a couple situations, these illustrate some very big issues in our culture, the corporate world, and our education system. (Disclaimer, I am not calling out DeVry in any sense. I loved my education and it set me up for great success. In fact, I was even crazy enough to go back and get a Masters from their graduate program.) In fact, any one person should only be limited by their own imagination or to quote the great philosopher, (Captain) Jack Sparrow: “The only rules that matter are these: what a man can do and what he can’t do.” Our rum-loving friend had a great insight. The more I learn about my career the more I realize I didn’t have a clue when I started out.
So, here’s the deal, I have been around the industry long enough to watch the shift from hardware to virtual machines to now cloud hosted workloads. I have worked within IT operations long enough to go from carrying a pager to two phones to an app-based on call rotation. I have seen the Internet go from a dial-up access to email and AIM to an essential element for virtually every industry. I have learned a thing or two along that journey and I really feel like I would be doing the industry a disservice to keep those lessons to myself. Heck, even writing that out made me think, “Hhmm, maybe I do know a couple of things!”
So, here is what I plan to bring your way. I want to address some issues that weigh on my mind: work/life balance, operational priorities, marketing buzzwords, career pathing, just to name a few. I want to share my experiences, make a few jokes, and deliver relevant news, content, and maybe a few tutorials along the way. I want to make my content available via blogs, vlogs, podcasts, conferences, whatever medium I need to use to help my fellow technologists find out where their passion and skills could best take them.
I had the pleasure of speaking at the Kansas City DevOps Meetup in downtown Kansas City! It was kind of like a coming home party. KC DevOps Days is where I got my start at GitLab and set me on a path towards a career I never imagined possible. This event, in the vault of the downtown library was my chance to share GitLab’s story to my local meetup. It was well received and even led to an impromptu demo of the GitLab product!
In the IT Industry, many incidents have been misunderstood or blown out of proportion due to poor handling of communications during and right after a crisis arises. The how, when, and how much communication can be the difference between a media frenzy and an outage that people work through and forget about. Ever since a database outage in January of 2017, companies and contributors have received timely and effective communication from Gitlab.
I gave my Busting Open Source Security Myths talk at DevSecOps Days Denver to a packed out auditorium. If was so well received, I decided to bring it back for Day 2 of SELF 2019!
Developers are constantly being asked to make more and more powerful applications. The more feature-rich the application, though, the more prone to risk it becomes. Many have thought the solution is to keep the code base locked up tight, that open source is undesirable. The truth, however, is quite the opposite! More eyes on code has proven to increase the quality and security of the modern application.
This talk defined the voice of the IT Guy for me. This was the moment when the Sudo Show got its wings, when I realized that I was on the right track towards re-inventing my career. I had people in the room I respected a great deal nodding along in agreement. This was where it REALLY started for me.
So, you are interested in technology, you want to contribute to something bigger than yourself, you can’t wait to join a global community…but where do you start? Is coding the only way in? Let’s take a practical look at how to go from consumer to contributor!
South East Linux Fest 2019 was an amazing test of the IT Guy…not as a brand but as the person I wanted to be in my career. I gave 3 talks in 3 days and spent a lot of time chatting with different folks, sharing stories, answering questions. It challenged my introverted nature and my public speaking skills.
The entire conference was an amazing experience that I will always cherish!
Now more than ever, developers have more tools to pick from than hours in the day. It is so easy to spend more time maintaining the development pipeline than it is actually developing. What if the planning, coding, building, testing, and deployment could all be handled from one tool in one interface? Well it can! Gitlab can cut down on tool chain bloat and decrease cycle times!
Getting started in my career, I never imagined I would work in sales or go speak at conferences! I was very nervous and I think that showed. What was worse is I had the first breakout after lunch and the next room was a dive into chaos engineering! I learned a LOT from this event and later revamped my talk to present to the DevOps meetup in Kansas City.
In the IT Industry, many incidents have been misunderstood or blown out of proportion due to poor handling of communications during and right after a crisis arises. The how, when, and how much communication can be the difference between a media frenzy and an outage that people work through and forget about. Ever since a database outage in January of 2017, companies and contributors have received timely and effective communication from Gitlab.
Hey all! I am starting a new open source “project”: my next home! Please help me by making recommendations and helping me build the IT Guy’s dream house!
We got a single test episode before going back to the drawing board. After months of networking, planning, seeing what else is out there, we settled on a great approach that we feel will be unique and can make a difference in IT and how technologists do work.
Some time ago, our favorite IT Guy published a couple of test episodes. Its funny to look back at these episodes in light of the upcoming release of The IT Guy podcast!
Waaaaay back on Episode 26 of the Ask Noah Show, The IT Guy was being formed an molded. Now, a little over a year later, we are getting ready to launch our brand, our podcast, and our efforts to help shape how the open source community does work!
I got to join Noah Chelliah on the Ask Noah Show to continue my coverage of Peertube. It was a great chat, took a couple of calls, and found a toy I really want from Paravel Systems: The Rivendell Audio Appliance!
