ping in Ansible playbooks

The ping module documentation says that it does not make sense in playbooks, but it is useful only for /usr/bin/ansible. Well I think there is a case where you can include it in a playbook, and that is when you disable fact gathering. I really want to know if there is something wrong with connecting to a server, prior to starting executing the whole playbook scenario and be left with a half played one to redo. So, at least for the host sizes that I apply this, it does not hurt to have this as the first task:

---
- hosts: whatever
  user: whoever
  gather_facts: no
  tasks:
  - name: ping all hosts
    ping:

The fact gathering phase implicitly runs the setup module. If your play does not make use of fact computation, you may want to disable it and use ping, just to check how ssh communicates with ansible before feeding it work to do.

My browser’s “home” page

I try not to keep fifty tabs open and stress test my browser. But nowadays, opening my browser stress tests me. Whenever I fire it up, it opens:

  • Gmail
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Yammer
  • Parley

and I used to open ServerFault too. And I’ve not even mentioned Thunderbird. That is a one way trip to feeling tired 5 minutes after the day begins.

Optimisations are coming.

(no title)

Today I was listening to:

Now I’m shifted a bit upstream to make sure that we continue to load that pipeline with innovation. I have an opportunity to spend time in Silicon Valley, and just recently in Israel, meeting with partners, potential partners, whether they’re small companies, start-ups, or large companies that have innovative ideas that really could create new experiences for our customers

Just an observation for fellow Greeks because even in a remote work world location matters. And those who startup from here need to put Greece on the map.

Παστίτσιο

Δεν είμαι σε θέση να κρίνω την απόφαση, αλλά σε όσους συμφωνούν με αυτή έχω ένα ερώτημα:

– Ποιος προσβάλλει περισσότερο τον Παϊσιο (και το θρήσκευμα): Ο Παστίτσιος ή όσοι αποδίδουν μυθικές ικανότητες στον γέροντα;

Ούτε ο Παϊσιος θα αποδεχόταν τις δυνάμεις που του αποδίδουν.

Racket on the Mac

Since I’ve bought “Realm of Racket” I thought that I should install Racket on the Mac. The last time I seriously looked into it it was still called PLT-Scheme.

My first choice was to use a homebrew formula. Unfortunately this requires XQuartz and I did not feel like installing it too.

My second try was to compile it from the source. ../configure –disable-gracket && make worked, but make install failed. I really did not bother with why. I just wanted to install it and play around. This was not an installation for a lot of users after all.

So I got to download the precompiled Mac binary from the web site. 364M later it was all installed and happy.

Let’s see now if I’ll go through the book top to bottom…

PS: I remembered that I owned the eBook from this Ruby Rogues episode.