At work I have to use Windows as operating system on my workstation, even though I manage almost only linux servers. There are dozens of ways to connect from Windows via SSH to a linux server and I will tell you my way.

I started (of course) with PuTTY, the ...

Most people are probably already aware of this fact, but you can test your Ansible-roles on multiple Ansible versions (e.g. 1.9 and 2.0) with the help of Travis.

This is done using environment variables. When multiple environment variables are specified, a build will be run for every ...

We - at the hardening.io-team - create Ansible (and Puppet and Chef) roles that harden the security of our Linux-servers. They are meant to be used in production so we try to provide these roles to several different operating systems, including Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat and its derivates.

Manually testing the roles on many different systems is a very time-consuming task: You’ll have to set up a virtual machine, update it, install Ansible, run the playbook, fix an error, rinse and repeat. If you want to do this on many different operating systems, doing it manually is impossible.

Some time ago I had to use a new CentOS 7 virtual-machine for some things that aren’t relevant to this post. This machine had to run all the time but also had some problems with a sporadically failing application server. That’s why I decided to monitor the machine ...

I accidentally spilled tea on my Microsoft natural ergonomic keyboard (Referal link). After cleaning up the visible mess I continued to use the keyboard as normal as everything still worked. But the next day the keyboard didn’t work anymore. The lights were still flashing but the keys I pressed ...