Recently I have started to take more time to learn Ansible, building role-based projects similar to what I’ve always done with Puppet, as opposed to simple monolithic playbooks. I still believe Puppet is superior to Ansible when a host has a long list of items to be managed, whereas Ansible excels for more narrowly-scoped tasks… Read More


I use Foreman for provisioning systems in both my lab and at work. For the most part I’ve had success over the years kickstarting CentOS/Enterprise Linux systems from Foreman using both PXE booting and the lightweight iPXE ISO. These include various generations of HP servers, custom-built desktops, and the following virtual machine types: Virtual Box,… Read More


Greetings! It has been a while since I’ve posted anything in my systems administration blog. In this post I will describe my process for building a newer version of the Mongo C driver for Enterprise Linux/CentOS 7. These steps were also performed on an Enterprise Linux 6 system, but this post will focus on EL7… Read More