Linux

When I was starting to dive deeper into the Ops world, I learned an interesting thing about Linux filesystems and moving files around. This was essential knowledge as my team worked with very large files on a performance-critical system. To improve performance, sometimes moving a file is faster than copying it. In this situation, a move is defined as transferring a file to another location and ensuring that the file at the original location no longer exists. A copy preserves the file at the original location, essentially cloning it. ...

While creating Ansible scripts to automate the configuration of servers, I frequently stumble across an issue where I need to setup a user’s profile on the server that has a custom path. The issue that arises is that the .bash_profile file is a single file where any number of PATH exports can be provided. Any step in a provisioning tool like Ansible should be aware that this only adds state. I have seen other DevOps workers use modules like lineinfile, which I abhor because you can never be certain that the module will work. You will always ask yourself, “did the PATH on line 5 get set correctly, or did someone change one character (or perhaps add a comment) that now breaks the lineinfile module task?” ...