Deja Vu All Over Again

I recently joined Cray Research, the supercomputer folk, after 1.5 years doing pre-sales engineering for a technology I love. However, I didn't actually love (nor even really like) sales itself. So I'm back to doing engineering.

Two days after Cray hired me, their merger with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) completed, so I'm back at HP (but now HPE). Most of the impact of that change occurs on January 1, 2020.

So not only the yogiberra-ism of "Deja Vu All Over Again" but also the godfather-ism of "When I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

ansible tower token authentication

Reminder to self mostly, when refreshing your memory about tokens, start with this page:
ansible authentication methods and tokens

I'll come back here when I have something more substantive to say about this. The PAT token is dead easy, straight-forward and has naught to do with Point After Try.

letsencrypt with certbot

Well, the title is the task I was trying to accomplish but I kept getting an error. Turns out, the awscli in Ubuntu is seriously out of date. It gives an error like:

'AWSHTTPSConnection' object has no attribute 'server_hostname'

when using certbot (more on that below). The simple and easily googleable fix was to remove the ubuntu awscli package and pip install a newer version:

sudo apt-get remove awscli

pip install --upgrade awscli

I'd recommend doing that pip install in a venv (python virtual environment), especially if you have other "cloud tools" installed that way.

---

Now, why was I doing this and what does the title really mean? Most websites these days need to have an "SSL Cert" that is a signature by a certification authority. Really folks, you need to be doing this these days. Many businesses will not let you browse to a site that has a self signed cert and won't let you browse to a non-https site at all. But this is super easy as Let's Encrypt and certbot do all the work. I merely followed the steps here:

https://hackernoon.com/easy-lets-encrypt-certificates-on-aws-79387767830b

(Make sure you have certbot installed first. Your OS may have it packaged or "brew install certbot" on a Mac.)

And as with all of my recent posts, this is just mostly so I won't spend another 1/2 day trying to remember or recreate this.

And in all fairness, there are also a number of Ansible playbooks and/or roles for doing this. Here's some info on that:

https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-certbot

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.5/modules/letsencrypt_module.html 

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/acme_account_module.html 

(Ansible letsencrypt module was renamed more generically as "ACME" as it actually uses ACME and Let's Encrypt adheres to that web standard.)

More fun with Ansible

I've been in an Ansible Solutions Architect (SA) role at Red Hat for about a year, but I still learn new things about Ansible every day.

When I explored ARA I first became familiar with Ansible Callbacks (that get called at the conclusion of tasks, plays, etc.) And I've been needing to make some modifications (filters, etc) to the PLAY RECAP at the end of an Ansible play. Note that there are numerous callbacks pre-written listed here, but occasionally you need to write a custom one. In this case, I just wanted a better understanding of what those pre-written ones can do. And, lo and behold, there's a nicely documented page that shows you that.

Thank you Random Hero.

Weird tab behavior in Google Chrome

I run Chrome as my primary browser (so far) and it has never failed me. Yesterday however, I began to see a very strange behavior. As soon as I would click on any tab (other than the first tab), Chrome would start cycling down through the tabs. I.e., if I clicked on the 4th one, it would switch to that, then to the 3rd, then the 2nd, and finally the first tab (where it would remain.)

Switching to a new window (with only one tab) would work fine but as soon as another tab was opened, the same behavior.

Survived through reboots, chrome upgrades etc.

I think I have isolated this to either a funky (dirty?) keyboard or flakey mouse. Once I disconnected both the external keyboard and mouse, things returned to normal. Now doing the bisect to see if mouse or keyboard. One note: My kitchen has been under renovation for the last month. Consequently, I've done a lot more "eating over the keyboard" than normal, so maybe I just dropped some weird crumb that effectively doees control-pageup repeatedly (or some other previous tab command over and over.) I didn't notice this behavior in other "tab oriented" programs (such as gnome terminal or Firefox.)

Updates here if I further resolve this.

Oh and some search terms in case anyone else runs into this:
ubuntu
chrome
chrome-beta
(occurred in both)
tab switching
autotab switching
tab bug
google chrome tab bug
google chrome tab autoswitching bug

(Oh and for those playing along at home: restarted chrome numerous times, disabled all extensions, rebooted, upgraded Chrome, upgraded all Ubuntu packages--basically did all the "best practices" I could think of to work around this. The only work around seems to be disconnecting mouse and keyboard (which were plugged into a USB C dongle providing legacy USB connections.) System is HP Spectre x360 15" touch with 8th gen i7 running Ubuntu 18.04.2

Mouse seems to be working fine.

Blew some dust/gunk/ick out of my keyboard and now everything seems to be working again. (The peripherals are attached in the same order, same location.) So LIKELY the keyboard? The world may never know (and I'm sure the world will never care.)