2015 ~ Ahmed AbouZaid!

16/12/2015

Now I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Ahmed AbouZaid 16/12/2015 AWS, Certificate, Cloud Computing Comments

Here we are, now I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect :-)

My favorite part in AWS Solutions Architect is "AWS Reference Architecture",

13/12/2015

LibreOffice macro to fix common mistakes with Regex - Python

Ahmed AbouZaid 13/12/2015 LibreOffice, Python, Regex Comments

However I'm a Linux system admin, but I have other activities too. As a technical writer and an author, I work a lot with text, and as usual I always try to automate what can be automated even outside system administration!

23/11/2015

I just got my AWS SysOps Administrator certification

Ahmed AbouZaid 23/11/2015 AWS, Certificate, DevOps, SysAdmin Comments

Last Saturday, I passed AWS SysOps Administrator exam and got the certification :-)

Although I still have concerns about most

14/11/2015

Run playbook starting of a certain task - Ansible

Ahmed AbouZaid 14/11/2015 Ansible, DevOps Comments

Most of the time when people test Ansible playbook or debugging it, I see them run the whole of playbook every time! But one of my preferred ways to do that is "Start and Step".

These options allow you to run playbooks from a

05/11/2015

Trigger click event on elements - Native JavaScript and JQuery

Ahmed AbouZaid 05/11/2015 Tips and Tricks Comments

Maybe I'm a Sysops guy, and don't use JavaScript on a daily basis, but JS became a mandatory language and got an elastic eco-system, so as a power user you may need it from time to time to do some fancy things :D

25/10/2015

Opsview/Nagios as dynamic inventory for Ansible - Python

Ahmed AbouZaid 25/10/2015 Ansible, Nagios/Opsview, Python Comments

Abstract.

I needed to a unified inventory for all servers I manage, so I made a Python script retrieves servers list and ssh ports from Opsview via APIs, and it supports 4 kinds of output formats:

Ansible dynamic inventory.
Ansible static inventory (INI-like).
OpenSSH config file.
Pure JSON.

You can find it on Github: Opsview as Ansible inventory.
It looks like a hack more than anything else, and most importantly .. it works! :D
And for now it's enough for current needs.

15/10/2015

Getting Started with Ansible - Presentation

Ahmed AbouZaid 15/10/2015 Ansible, DevOps, Presentation Comments

If you looked at the sidebar of this blog, you will find I introduce myself as linux system engineer who is too lazy to do anything manually :D

I have no problem to digging and troubleshooting an issue for hours, or dealing with new technology from zero, but

09/10/2015

Install S3cmd via pip - Ansible

Ahmed AbouZaid 09/10/2015 Ansible, AWS Comments

Recently, I needed to install S3Cmd with some other tools via pip, but I didn't find any Ansible role do that, so I made one "ansible-latest-s3cmd".

02/10/2015

Efficient and quick way to delete files! - Bash

Ahmed AbouZaid 02/10/2015 Bash, Tips and Tricks Comments

On the sidelines of previous post "An efficient and quick way to search with find, grep, and xargs", I've just remembered one of servers has an issue with sessions garbage collection! So, after a while

27/09/2015

Efficient and quick search with find and grep - Bash

Ahmed AbouZaid 27/09/2015 Bash, Tips and Tricks Comments

When you need to search inside files, as linux user you will think in "grep", but when you try to search in zillion of files (or just thousands), grep isn't the best option for that!

It's very slow especially when you use "-r" option (recursive), even if you are going to use "fgrep" or "grep -F" (--fixed-strings) which interprets patterns as a list of fixed strings), thus it's a little bit faster because it treats the strings literally and doesn't try to parse them with regex.

05/09/2015

German nouns gender analyzer - Python

Ahmed AbouZaid 05/09/2015 German, Languages, Python Comments

I really enjoy learning new languages, not just grammar, but the whole culture of the language. The main problem when people try to learn a new language is the "comparison"! They always try to

06/08/2015

Working with CloudFlare API - Python

Ahmed AbouZaid 06/08/2015 Python, SysAdmin Comments

If you ask me, I will say that CloudFlare is one of the best companies appeared in last few years! CloudFlare came to fill a real need in the market! Whether as CDN (Content Delivery Network) or as security layer.

21/07/2015

CloudU Certificate? good but not for 2015!

Ahmed AbouZaid 21/07/2015 Certificate, Cloud Computing Comments

Today I got my "CloudU Certificate", after finishing the curriculum. It contains 10 chapters with 10 quizzes and final exam, it's pretty cool, but also it's a little bit old for 2015! However it's still a good refreshment to anyone even for someone already working in the field or intersted to learn about the theory of Cloud Computing.

01/07/2015

Book Summary 01: High Performance Browser Networking - Part1 (Networking 101)

Ahmed AbouZaid 01/07/2015 Books, DevOps, Summary Comments

Recently I started reading "High Performance Browser Networking", and If you ask me, I will say it's a masterpiece! Not just for developers, but also for SysAdmins and DevOps! This summary for first part of this great book, the first 4 chapters cover TCP, UDP, TLS, and networking essentials. Actually, as a system administrator, I've seen a lot of developers do the same mistakes (specially Front-End developers), small mistakes lead to big performance issues! And those mistakes can be fixed with minimum efforts! So I really love this book slogan "What every web developer should know about Networking and Browser Performance!"

24/06/2015

Ansible module to list groups in inventory - Bash/AWK

Ahmed AbouZaid 24/06/2015 Ansible, AWK, Bash Comments

Something I just remembered, just for fun, I created another versions of "Ansible module to list groups in inventory - Python" but with Bash, and AWK :D

20/06/2015

Ansible module to list groups in inventory - Python

Ahmed AbouZaid 20/06/2015 Ansible, Python Comments

Update 1/11/2015: I updated the module and made a Github repository "List Ansible inventory groups".

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I'm really in love with Ansible, it's very simple, very handy ... it's Awesome! You can master it in no time at all! Get Started now!

As far as I remember, I've been started using Ansible since v1.7,

05/06/2015

Generate Ansible inventory from SSH config file

Ahmed AbouZaid 05/06/2015 Ansible, AWK, Bash Comments

Update 10/1/2016: I updated script and made a Github repository for it: "ansible-inventory-from-ssh-config".
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For a long time I used "Gnome Connection Manager" to manage remote servers, however I moved to "Terminator". I really love Terminator, but If