A student asked me some time ago:

When I execute rm *.bak, hidden files aren’t removed. Don’t they match the globbing pattern?

In the previous post on testing Ansible roles with Travis-CI, I introduced a method to run playbooks on CentOS using Docker. In this post, we take this one step further and show how you can run multi-platform tests of Ansible roles.

In this first post on testing Ansible roles with Travis-CI, we’ll discuss how you can apply a test playbook on CentOS. Out-of-the-box, Travis-CI doesn’t support CentOS, as its test environment is Ubuntu-based. However, Travis-CI allows you to set up a Docker container and this opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Many HOWTO’s and blog posts about installing MySQL/MariaDB, a LAMP stack, etc. suggest to run the script mysql_secure_installation to tighten the security holes in the default installation of the database engine. This includes setting a root password (empty by default), removing anonymous users, and deleting a test database. For a database server that you’re going to run in production, it is really important to do this. However, I have a problem with the fact that mysql_secure_installation is interactive, i.e. it asks for user input. This makes it very hard to include it in an automated setup. In this post, we’ll discuss how the script works and how we can automate what it does.

VirtualBox Guest additions are a set of drivers that you can install on virtual machines to enable a few cool features: a scaling desktop in the VM, shared clipboard, shared folders, etc. This post discusses how to install these in Fedora 22.

One of the greatest pitfalls when working with VirtualBox VMs is a good understanding of how networking works. In this post, we’ll discuss the most important differences between them, and their limitations when you use VirtualBox to experiment with setting up network services on a VM.

In our system administration courses, we use VirtualBox to allow students to set up their own Linux machines without having to resort to dual booting. VirtualBox is certainly not the “best” virtualization platform, but it is supported on the three common desktop platforms and works similarly on all of them.

This weekend, I installed NetBeans 8.0.2 and was dismayed that it consistently) took 1' 23" to start. Here’s how I found out what went wrong. Spoiler: it’s a DNS problem.

This post was first published on Medium, but I moved it over here.