Vagrant + Chef Solo for local dev boxes mini howto

Rsync behavior

From rsync man page:

This would recursively transfer all files from the directory src/bar on the machine foo into the /data/tmp/bar directory on the local machine. The files are transferred in “archive” mode, which ensures that symbolic links, devices, attributes, permissions, ownerships, etc. are preserved in the transfer. Additionally, compression will be used to reduce the size of data portions of the transfer.

              rsync -avz foo:src/bar/ /data/tmp

A trailing slash on the source changes this behavior to avoid creating an additional directory level at the destination. You can think of a trailing / on a source as meaning “copy the contents of this directory” as opposed to “copy the directory by name”, but in both cases the attributes of the containing directory are transferred to the containing directory on the destination. In other words, each of the following commands copies the files in the same way, including their setting of the attributes of /dest/foo:

              rsync -av /src/foo /dest
              rsync -av /src/foo/ /dest/foo

nagios-nrpe Could not complete SSL handshake error

I you have an error like this:
“nrpe[22047]: Error: Could not complete SSL handshake”

on the Nagios nrpe server (on client to be monitored)

and you don’t need Nagios on SSL you can disable it with:

DAEMON_OPTS=”–no-ssl”
in /etc/default/nagios-nrpe-server.

Cool ascii art generator for your /etc/motd :)

If you want something like:

________        ___.   .__               
\______ \   ____\_ |__ |__|____    ____  
 |    |  \_/ __ \| __ \|  \__  \  /    \ 
 |    `   \  ___/| \_\ \  |/ __ \|   |  \
/_______  /\___   ___  /__(____  /___|  /
        \/     \/    \/        \/     \/

on your /etc/motd, you can go and get it here:

http://patorjk.com/software/taag/

Selenium grid server startup script Debian Wheezy

AWS IAM arn permissions for s3 bucket

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "s3:*",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::bucket_name/*"
    }
  ]
}

Chef: for loop to install packages in recipe (debian)

for p in [ "libapache2-mod-php5", "php-pear", "php5-cli", "php5-common", "php5-curl", "php5-dev", "php5-gd", "php5-mysql", "php5-suhosin", "ant" ] do
  package p do
    action [:install]
  end
end