Tutorial Speakers

After a recap of the development virtues and most important features of libiocage, this tutorial will dive directly into programatic control of iocage using the Python module. We will explore iocage for task automation, learn how build daemonized services and develop our own ephemeral jail service. Although this talk is mainly held in Python 3 and English we will also interface with other languages by scripting custom data interfaces.

This tutorial is inclusive for any development or system administration skill level: Learning materials in form of shell access to a staging environment, that will include working samples of the code developed during this session, will give a global context and invite for hands-on hacking – bring your own dotfiles.

Introduction

Managing a complex system landscape with various operating systems, applications, versions, patch-levels, etc. is a challenging task for every system administrator. Ansible is a system to manage this complexity by abstracting away the specific parts and let’s administrators focus on defining the tasks that should be executed on the remote machine. Using SSH to securely transport these changes and then translating them to OS-specific commands in an idempotent manner, Ansible is flexible and offers a powerful, YAML-based syntax for bigger deployments called Playbooks. Modules in Ansible provide the functionality to make changes for all kinds of applications and use cases on the remote systems. We will look at how to use them to make even complex changes easy and repeatable, without worrying about applying these changes multiple times.

Tutorial Content

In my tutorial, I will focus on how to get started with Ansible as a beginner and what specifics are necessary to set it up for BSD systems. We will start with simple one-liners and then start writing our first playbooks.

Updated Content

Since the last time I held this tutorial at EuroBSDcon 2017, I’ve added the following new and updated parts to reflect the current Ansible system:

Ansible Vault (storing secrets and provide them as variables to Playbooks)
Lookups (using external sources like files or databases as providers for variables)
Handlers (execute certain actions only when a task actually changed the target system)
Conditional Execution (run tasks only when certain conditions are met)
Strategies (different ways to execute the tasks in a playbook)

Audience

Sysadmins who want to learn Ansible to automatically manage their systems and software in a predictable and consistent way. Basic knowledge of the Unix commandline and OpenSSH usage is a requirement for this tutorial.

Contents at a Glance

We will create ports out of some example software and walk through the steps and files needed to make it build and install within the Ports framework. We will look at how to set up and use Poudriere to test and verify our port, as well as creating a package of it for installation.

Details

Ports are the third party software system, or packaging system, used by FreeBSD, and the ports tree is the basis from which binary packages are created. Porting new software or maintaining existing ports is a great way to contribute to FreeBSD and a great way to get more involved in the community and the project. It is also a way to create easy to distribute packages for company internal software on your FreeBSD systems.

Poudriere is the tool used to build the official FreeBSD packages (for installation with pkg) as well as a tool to test the build and packaging of a port.

Audience

This tutorial is aimed at anyone who want to learn the basics about FreeBSD ports system, and how to create and maintain a port. It is also aimed at anyone who want to use poudriere to test ports, and to build their own packages for distribution and installation. This can be used to create and distribute packages of internal tools at your work, or to help out with ports and packages in FreeBSD.

No previous knowledge of the Ports system or programming is needed, but some familiarity with FreeBSD and the command line is expected, as well as knowledge about how to edit files.

To get the most out of this tutorial, access to a FreeBSD system with admin (root) rights is recommended.

He has been a FreeBSD contributor for more than ten years, and a committer for six of those, working in the ports tree and sometimes writing documentation. Most notably, he’s involved in the FreeBSD port of the xorg graphics environment and maintain several other ports

When not contributing to FreeBSD, he works as an IT consultant, primarily with IT security and systems administration, or he can be found in the bowling alley, trying to knock pins over.

Yes, his laptop runs FreeBSD.

Participants will need to have the ability to edit, compile, and run C programs on a BSD based machine with the most recent version of libressl installed. Tutorial and solutions are hosted on github, so git will also be required to work with the materiel and solutions.

https://github.com/bob-beck/libtls

He has been involved in OpenBSD since 1996 and works in various areas in OpenBSD.

I will teach you the relevant basics of networking and how BGP is used in the wild. At my day job, I run the 4th most connected network in Germany, and are a developer with OpenBSD focusing on networking and OpenBGPD.

Knowledge of subnets or routing is not required.