daily devops problems solved and explained

If you are using custom scripted services or event scripts in Dreamfactory you might have noticed its not ideal how to install and maintain them. Uploading individual files via browser, the system/ API or directly editing them in Dreamfactory is error-prone. Its also not fitting very well into an automated environment.

Read on after the jump how to manage and deploy your custom scripted PHP services in a sane manner. The same way Dreamfactory installs its own modules, utilizing PHP composer

Read more

When working with Dreamfactory it might be desired and helpful to have additional claims (key/values) in the user session JWT token.

In my scenario I have custom API services / scripts which do calls to other services (DB, SOAP, external REST API). However not all calls work with only the email from the user session but rather require certain IDs not related to Dreamfactory at all. So the services would first have to fetch the Id by email resulting in additional API calls all the time causing slower response times.

So I was looking for a way to store those key/values. Read on after the jump how I solved it.

Read more

So in my last article I talked about how to get Dreamfactory running within a Docker container with having immutability and horizontal scalability in mind and being able to use it with a Docker orchestrator like Mesos, Marathon, AWS ECS etc.

This time I’ll go into some details about extending it with custom logic / API endpoints as you certainly dont want to let API users access all of the auto-generated API endpoints in regard of security or they simply lack logic.
Dreamfactory has a good role-based ACL which works just fine for several service-types (e.g. MySQL DBs) where you can define server-side filters (e.g. by email from their session) on a record-level which allows users to only work on records belonging to them.
However the roles have their limits. But this is only one reason for adding custom services. You can script your own services aswell as “hook” into existing (auto-generated) services pre/post-process.

Read more

One feature of Spacewalk is the ability to review auditd logs. If you dont know what auditd is, here is a good introduction http://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/01/a-brief-introduction-to-auditd/
To sum it up, you can monitor/log nearly every change on your system with it, like file access, file attribute changes, logins, service starts, user interaction etc. based on rules.
As you can imagine, this produces a tremendous amount of logs. For effectively reading them, we need some assistance. For instance: Spacewalk.
Read more

As announced on the Spacewalk Mailinglist Spacewalk 2.3 is going to be released soon and is on QA/QE now.

I took this as a reason for testing Ubuntu / Debian integration with Spacewalk 2.3 from nightly repo. As it turns out, everything is working good, namely:

• Creation of Debian Channels
• Pushing / Syncing .deb packages to Spacewalk
• Registering Ubuntu systems
• Importing Ubuntu Errata ( I updated errata-import.pl script slightly to make it work )
• OSAD
• Package management
• Remote Command Execution

Refer to my other articles around Spacewalk about how to set all this up.