Ringo De Smet

In a previous article, I explained how to dump all your bookmarks from Delicious using a web scraper. As I’m switching to Pinboard, I still needed a way to import the exported bookmarks

The Export tab in your Delicious bookmarks account shows it has been disabled due to heavy load on the database. Too bad, but that doesn’t prevent me from using the web scraping trick to download all my bookmarks.

Configuration Management tools can be of good use to provision your Docker containers. But you don’t want these tools to end up in your Docker images. Using Data Volume Containers and Docker Compose, we can do this and still have a slim image. Here is how you can do it with Chef.

If you are tasked with migrating a Team Foundation Server (TFS) code repository to Git and search the net, you will quickly find a number of tools:

• git-tfs
• TFS2GIT
• Git-TF

The latter two solutions were tried in converting from the TFS repository to a Git repository.

In a previous article, I talked about converting from TFS to Git and documented the normalization of the line endings in the converted Git repository. Another aspect of source code is whether spaces or tabs should be used.

Again, I’m not going to argument in favor of one or the other, but just document how you can get a consistent setup for your team. This setup however is something that can’t be easily committed in the repository itself like it was done with the line ending configuration. The main reason are the scripts that need to be executed to make sure that any content is processed when checking out or into the repository.

The VirtualBox forums lists numerous reports of people not being able to get VirtualBox to work with raw disk partitions. Initially I bumped into the same problems, but got it working in the end.

The setup used in this article is an Ubuntu 12.04 host system with VirtualBox 4.1.18 installed. From disk /dev/sda the partitions 3 and 4 will be made available to a virtual machine. All virtual machines are run as user virtualbox. All console samples show clearly the user that runs the command.

There is a lot of documentation on the use of Debian/Ubuntu packaging tools, but most of these pages just list the options of each of these tools. After fighting with these for some period, I jumped over to the #ubuntu-packaging IRC channel for help. After explaining my intent of backporting some packages unchanged, I was pointed to the backportpackage tool:

 backportpackage fetches a package from one distribution release or from a
 specified .dsc path or URL and creates a no-change backport of that package
 to one or more Ubuntu releases release, optionally doing a test build of 
 the package and/or uploading the resulting backport for testing.

This tool comes with the ubuntu-dev-tools package.

Secure Shell is a great tool for securely connecting between several machines. In the past weeks, I am using it more and more, but I was getting tired of typing too much. I found a great article on setting up passwordless authentication using public/private keys and defining multiple SSH identities, but it still wasn’t enough.

Continuing with the volume created in the post Sharing EBS Volumes Among Instances, in this post I show how to create a snapshot, create a new volume from that snapshot, and mount the new volume in an instance. Remember that the volume created in the previous post contained 1 file called readme.

In this post I share an experiment to create an EBS volume, to attach it to an EC2 instance, to mount it in the instance, to put a file on it, to unmount it, and to detach it. Afterwards the volume will be mounted in another instance (while the first instance has been terminated, because attaching volumes to different instances at the same time is impossible).