Regular Expressions Quick Guide

Posted on April 8, 2021August 4, 2021 by Marco Antonio Carcano

A pillar every Linux professional must have are certainly Regular Expressions: they are broadly used every time is required to lookup or substitute a pattern that matches some criteria. Tools such as grep and sed miss almost all of their power if who is using them does not have a good understanding of Regular Expressions. This is really a huge topic: there's more than one book that is fully focused on regular expressions - this post is only a quick guide: the aim of this post is to let the reader get the gist of what Regular Expressions are by explaining everything that is needed to know to face the common use cases that may arise during daily work..

Pulp 3 as a caching proxy of the online Ansible Galaxy

Posted on April 7, 2021May 8, 2021 by Marco Antonio Carcano

When dealing with environments that should meet security regulations it is very unlikely that systems have direct access to the Internet: they connect to the Internet by the means of a content proxy.

When dealing with the need of access the online Ansible Galaxy, you may think that creating the access rule on the corporate proxy is enough to sort things out, but it isn't: besides the poor performances due to the latency for downloading contents from the Internet, there's also the security concern that it is possible to upload contents to Ansible Galaxy using that proxy.

If you are working in an environment with sensitive data, this is a huge security risk that you can mitigate by using an on premise repository manager that mirrors the contents you need from the online Ansible Galaxy.

This post shows you how easily you can mirror a subset of the collections hosted onto the online Ansible Galaxy by using Pulp3 with the Ansible plugin.

Installing Pulp3 as a container

Posted on April 4, 2021October 6, 2022 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Pulp is the repository manager used by Katello (the upstream project of Red Hat Network Satellite server 6.x). This Pulp version is really exciting, since it comes with several plugins that let you host several kind of repositories:

generic files
software packages: RPM packages, Deb Packages and even Container Images
software modules: Python modules, Maven contents, Ruby Gem
contents configuration management software: Ansible roles and collections and Chef cookbooks

In this post I'll show you how easy it is to install Pulp3 as container using the official container image.