Category: General Tech

Website Scraping With Python and Beautiful Soup

So a buddy of mine asked me to help him write a shell script which can scrape content from a website and put it into a mongodb database. I didn’t really feel like writing a shell script to do that since I figured it would be a huge pain in the a**. So I decided

Puppet ENC With MongoDB Backend

So I decided to release this bit of code I wrote which allows you to leverage mongodb as an ENC for puppet. I am not yet sure if this is a premature move or not but I plan to be using it in production in the next few weeks. I have a list of features

Send Zabbix Alerts To HipChat

In my current environment we use HipChat extensively for communication, and our CI server sends a lot of events to HipChat so I figured I would send Zabbix alerts there as well. This is a pretty simple how-to and should only take you about 10 minutes to implement.

Puppet Relationships & App Deployment

I wanted to write a blog post about something that I assume other people might be struggling with when deploying applications to EC2. Specifically how do I tell my deployment scripts (fabric in my case) to wait until puppet has finished before moving on to actually deploying my application.

Ubuntu & EC2 – Device or resource busy

I’m currently in the process of writing automation to deploy replica sets of mongodb to the cloud with a single command. When attaching my EBS volumes I noticed that I was regularly getting an error that stated: mdadm: cannot open /dev/xvdf: Device or resource busy