I usually like to use python to script my day to day tests against Katello (you may have seen some of my previous posts about using the Katello CLI for the same purpose) and I figured I’d start showing some basic examples for anyone else out there who may be interested. Assuming you have already installed and configured your Katello instance (learn how to do this here) with the default configurations, we now have a few options to proceed:

Lately I have been asked a lot about my previous script to automatically populate a Katello server instance with real data (hi reyc!) I wrote that a while back and though it still does contain some helpful commands, I figured it was about time I updated it. Well, it took me longer than I expected to find some time and clean it up, but I think I can now show you a brand new script which also includes the extra feature of downloading a manifest file directly from Red Hat's portal and importing it as part of the process.

These last couple of years have brought (along with some new wrinkles and occasional grey hairs) some interesting changes on how I manage and maintain my “digital belongings”. For a long while I used to worry about backing up and storing in a safe place all the files, photos, books, movies and music I’ve collected through the years. I have also managed to collect a variety of different external USB hard drives to keep up with this digital sprawl, where for each iteration the next device would increase in size and sometimes in speed compared to the current one.

 Yesterday I had one of those “once in a a lifetime” opportunities, thanks to my wife who dragged me to a presentation hosted by the University of North Carolina. The presentation by Dr. Eduardo Torres Cuevas, titled “Preserving Cuba’s Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century” attracted a small gathering, apparently mostly made up of UNC staff and students who are currently enrolled in one of their languages courses. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from it, but being the supportive husband that I am, I signed off from work a bit earlier and together with our 2 kids we drove to the main campus.

Woke up to the following email this morning: Dear Og Maciel, Congratulations on your one-year anniversary with Red Hat! Thank you for your commitment and work over the past year. We hope that it has been everything you expected it to be and look forward to celebrating your future success with the company. Time sure flies when you’re having too much fun! I can’t believe it’s been one whole year since I joined Red Hat as a Senior QA Engineer to work on their CloudForms project!

Just wanted to follow up on my previous post in regards to how to resize the root partition of an EC2 instance. Turns out that, once you’ve edited the root partition while in the launch panel, you can then perform the resize command right away, as soon as the instance is up and running and you have ssh’ed to it. [root@ip-aa-bb-cc-dd ~]# resize2fs /dev/xvde1 This is definitely better than what I thought one had to do to get a bigger root partition.

Today I was playing with EC2, trying to launch a RHEL 6.3 instance so that I could then install the latest version of Katello and beat a bit on it… just for fun, you know? Using the EC2 Management Console web interface I used the “classical” wizard to select all the components I wanted for a m1.large instance, making sure to edit the default 7.5 GB root partition they give you so that I could have more space available to synchronize content… but when the instance finally came up I realized that my disk space was still showing the default value: