Villa Rica, Georgia, United States
921 followers 500+ connections

Join to view profile

About

Seasoned technology professional with a passion for systems administration and the DevOps…

Articles by Gene

  • An Unsupportable Path
    Jun 15, 2025

    An Unsupportable Path

    Back in December I wrote about how we, the community behind the open source project called #Puppet, were being forced…

    1 Comment
  • The community is forking Puppet
    Dec 17, 2024

    The community is forking Puppet

    So, here's an updated tl;dr on #Puppet as an #OpenSource project: a fork is absolutely coming now. There was a "town…

    13 Comments
  • Breaking up a large pull request
    Oct 17, 2018

    Breaking up a large pull request

    Ever finished up all the changes for a pull request on GitHub and realized it was just too big to review easily or to…

  • My journey to securing sensitive data in Puppet code
    Aug 15, 2018

    My journey to securing sensitive data in Puppet code

    Dealing with secrets and sensitive data in Puppet is daunting, right? Nope, not at all. Let me show you how to do it.

  • The Road to Puppet 5
    Aug 9, 2017

    The Road to Puppet 5

    Not long ago Puppet released version 5 to the open source world so, naturally, it was time to start updating all my…

  • Automatically generate GoAccess stats
    Jun 16, 2017

    Automatically generate GoAccess stats

    I've been using GoAccess to look at my logs for a while now. The other day I decided I wanted be able to look at these…

  • Node.js, CentOS7, and libhttp_parser.so.2
    Jun 7, 2017

    Node.js, CentOS7, and libhttp_parser.so.2

    Don't you just love it when package maintainers break you blog? Yeah, me too. Tonight I went to post an article (no…

    2 Comments
  • Zabbix 3.2 is WAY more efficient!
    May 10, 2017

    Zabbix 3.2 is WAY more efficient!

    Recently our Oracle DBA hit me up and said that all of a sudden some of his servers were showing a load average of…

  • Solving a WordPress 'http error'
    Mar 25, 2017

    Solving a WordPress 'http error'

    Tonight we were trying to make the first post on my wife’s blog and ran smack into a “Http error” message. When I…

  • Exploring Grafana
    Mar 5, 2017

    Exploring Grafana

    This weekend I decided to check out Grafana. My first test for it was setting up the Zabbix backend.

See all articles

Activity

Join now to see all activity

Experience & Education

  • LTN

View Gene’s full experience

By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.

Licenses & Certifications

Publications

  • Using The Multi Resource Declaration And Defined Types To Simplify Manifests

    Puppet

    Sometimes it seems you just keep repeating the same block of code with only one or two lines changed. Sometimes a single thing you need to do more than once is made up of the same two or three resources. These two scenarios are ones that I experience fairly often.

    They are also ones I regularly observe when doing code reviews for others. I am often met with interest and a response that is along the lines of “I didn’t know you could do that” when I mention the idea of simplifying the code…

    Sometimes it seems you just keep repeating the same block of code with only one or two lines changed. Sometimes a single thing you need to do more than once is made up of the same two or three resources. These two scenarios are ones that I experience fairly often.

    They are also ones I regularly observe when doing code reviews for others. I am often met with interest and a response that is along the lines of “I didn’t know you could do that” when I mention the idea of simplifying the code I am reviewing by using a multi-resource declaration or a defined type. This post will introduce you to multi-resource declarations and defined types and then walk you through a real-world example of putting them to use to configure load balancing of Puppet Enterprise’s services.

    See publication

  • My journey to securing sensitive data in Puppet code

    Puppet

    Dealing with secrets and sensitive data in Puppet is daunting, right? Nope, not at all. Let me show you how to do it. I've wrapped my head around the options available and want to share my journey in hopes of saving you from a few trials and tribulations.

    See publication

  • Tracking Server Uptimes

    Linux Journal

    Unlike some other OS's, Linux almost never has to reboot… or so I was told when I first started learning about it. To illustrate the point, my mentor introduced me to an app that he ran on all of his servers called uptimed. It is similar to the utility that most of us have heard of, uptime, except that it runs as a daemon and logs the system's uptime instead of just reading info that is lost on a reboot. Uptimed provides a secondary command called uprecords that give statistics and makes it…

    Unlike some other OS's, Linux almost never has to reboot… or so I was told when I first started learning about it. To illustrate the point, my mentor introduced me to an app that he ran on all of his servers called uptimed. It is similar to the utility that most of us have heard of, uptime, except that it runs as a daemon and logs the system's uptime instead of just reading info that is lost on a reboot. Uptimed provides a secondary command called uprecords that give statistics and makes it easy to see how long your server has been up, what the longest it has ever been up is, when it rebooted, and more.

    See publication

  • Setting the Resolution in an X-less VM

    Linux Journal

    Ever been working in a VM that is command line only and wished it wasn’t so small? Well, that was how I felt constantly until now. Step on past the break to see how to change the resolution in an X-less install by utilizing uvesafb.

    See publication

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition Released

    Linux Journal

    Linux Mint has just released their new distribution: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). It is a rolling distribution based off of Debian Testing instead of Ubuntu. Their goal is to have LMDE look identical to the main edition and to provide the same functionality while using Debian as a base. By being a rolling distribution, LMDE constantly receives updates instead of it being on a fixed version with set release dates.

    See publication

  • Centralized Logging with a Web Interface

    Linux Journal

    Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a web interface to the logs on your central log server? Well, dream no more because this one is a reality thanks to LogAnalyzer (aka phplogcon). Let's take a look at how to setup both it and its suggested syslog variant, rsyslog, on a central log server. We will approach this from the perspectives of both Gentoo where rsyslog is not the default (nor is anything else) and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which is already using rsyslog as the defacto logger. It is also worth…

    Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a web interface to the logs on your central log server? Well, dream no more because this one is a reality thanks to LogAnalyzer (aka phplogcon). Let's take a look at how to setup both it and its suggested syslog variant, rsyslog, on a central log server. We will approach this from the perspectives of both Gentoo where rsyslog is not the default (nor is anything else) and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which is already using rsyslog as the defacto logger. It is also worth mentioning that, according to the rsyslog site, Fedora also now defaults to rsyslog.

    See publication

  • 2 Computers via 1 Keyboard & Mouse

    Linux Journal

    Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

    See publication

  • Using Linux to Disinfect Windows

    Linux Journal

    Are you responsible for one or more Windows computers? If yes then the odds are really good that you have had to deal with cleaning viruses and malware. Did you know F-Secure offers a free Rescue CD built on Knoppix for just this purpose? Let's take a look at how easy the F-Secure Rescue CD is to use.

    See publication

  • TurnKey Linux

    Linux Journal

    Ever wanted to instantly have Drupal, Moodle, OTRS, MySQL, WordPress, Zimbra, Bugzilla, phpBB or a slew of other open source software packages up an running in a hassle-free manner to try out or available for rapid deployment? TurnKey Linux gives you just that.

    See publication

  • Leave the CDs in the Office

    Linux Journal

    There are few things more aggravating than going out to a coworker's office to work on their computer and finding that to fix it you need a CD that is sitting in your office. If you have ever experienced that, or would simply like to no longer need to tote that book of CDs with you every day, then this article is for you.

    See publication
Join now to see all publications

Recommendations received

7 people have recommended Gene

Join now to view

More activity by Gene

View Gene’s full profile

  • See who you know in common
  • Get introduced
  • Contact Gene directly
Join to view full profile

Other similar profiles

Explore more posts

Explore top content on LinkedIn

Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.

View top content

Add new skills with these courses

See all courses