Sacha Chua - tag - sysad https://sachachua.com/blog/tag/sysad/feed/index.xml Emacs, sketches, and life Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:20:27 GMT en-US daily 1 11ty Setting up virtual machines with Vagrant https://sachachua.com/blog/2013/12/setting-up-virtual-machines-with-vagrant/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 12:00:00 GMT geek https://sachachua.com/blog/?p=26388 I spent a week focusing on system administration, and I feel more comfortable with my setup already. My web server hosts a number of blogs (like this one!) as well as my QuantifiedAwesome.com tracking dashboard. I want to make sure that things are backed up and that I can verify that my backups are running by creating a working website. It’s also useful to have a separate development environment where I can try out server configuration changes before applying them to production. Virtual machines to the rescue!

Vagrant is a tool that makes it easy to create and manage virtual machines with forwarded ports and shared folders. I use it for a couple of Ubuntu-based virtual machines on my laptop, and another backup-focused virtual machine on our Ubuntu desktop.

2013-10-28 Setting up virtual machines with Vagrant

You can make your Vagrant box more secure by changing the default passwords for root and vagrant, and setting up your own SSH key. Use vagrant package and vagrant box add to make this a new base box.

Related tools:

  • Give Veewee kernel and install info, and it will make base boxes for you. Good for testing different versions of distributions.
  • Vagrant works with Chef, Puppet, or shell scripts for provisioning. Need to reverse-engineer config from an existing server? Check out Devstructure Blueprint.
  • If you upgrade kernels or Virtualbox/VMWare, you might find vagrant-vbguest handy.
  • If your host system is pretty much the same as your deployment system architecture, check out Docker for a lighter-weight way to isolate your development environment.

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These are some of my notes from when I was setting up my VMs. Different console backgrounds in Putty really help!

2013-10-28 Setting up my development environment VMs

 

2013-10-28 Deployment procedures

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

]]> Next steps for system administration https://sachachua.com/blog/2013/10/next-steps-for-system-administration/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:00:00 GMT geek https://sachachua.com/blog/?p=26314 System administration is one of those things that is useful to get better at before you need it. I’ve got a lot to learn in this area. For starters, I need to set up solid backups before I can let other people into my servers to help me. That way, even if things go haywire, I should be able to get things back in order. Once that’s sorted out, I can move on to tweaking my memory and server configuration so that I can make my website more responsive, and I can work on improving my web site.

What do I need to do in terms of system administration

So much to do, one step at a time… =)

You can view 7 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

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