Posts

Running a Local Consul Agent while Developing in WSL2

While working with DevOps projects that utilize a Consul KV store and it’s service discovery features, I found it useful to replicate a local agent to test against. To that end, getting a Consul agent up and running and accessible from both Windows and WSL2 proved usesful. TBH, this is a brittle setup; it’s far easier to just manage your Consul environment variables to point where needed instead. Consul Agent Setup in Windows Download the Consul binaries from Hashicorp for Windows here.

March 21, 2022 Read

Getting Up and Running with WSL2 in Windows 11

I slimmed down my workflow for Linux container development upon the release of Windows 11 – I took the release as an opportunity to clean up my local PC and start from scratch. This won’t be a typical workflow for users performing a standard upgrade. Before beginning, make sure you understand the caveats and limitations of using this method. Notably there is quite a bit more complexity to make local bind mounts for Docker volumes.

November 22, 2021 Read

Implementing Policy-based Routing on a Unifi USG

Configuring the Ubiquiti USG for policy based routing can be done through the config.gateway.json functionality or through the command line. Refer to Ubiquiti support document 215458888 for details on how to translate command line configuratio to a persistant config.gateway.json file that will survive between provisions to the USG. Unfortunately, Ubiquiti has basically given up on enhancing their USG line based on Vyatta, so we’re going to have to do this ourselves.

November 10, 2021 Read

Setting WSL2 Resource Limits

When Microsoft introduced WSL2 as a separate Hyper-V VM the resource usage model also changed particulary when combined with using Docker Desktop integrated into the your default WSL2 distribution. You can find more details in particular from this MS Documentation Default WSL2 Memory and CPU allocation For processors, the WSL2 VM is allocated the same number of processors as the Windows host. For Memory, it is allocated 80% of your total memory for Windows builds prior to 20175.

September 7, 2021 Read

Creating a local AWX dev environment

For development using Ansible, each specialist will need to have their installation of Ansible. If your ogranization also uses AWX or Tower for executing these playbooks, then ensuring that new content can be seamlessly deployed to AWX/Tower is greatly benefited by having each specialist running thier own local AWX/Tower environment. Creating the Local AWX Environment We’ll be running our local environment on a Windows workstation using WSL2. To get started, make sure you’ve got a a WSL2 distribution installed and running, and a container runtime like Docker Desktop for Windows or a very recent version of Podman already configured and running.

September 6, 2021 Read