The other day I was exporting json data from mongodb using mongoexport, and needed a way to exclude certain subdocument fields. mongoexport doesn’t support excluding fields.
jq saved the day.
I piped the output of mongoexport through jq, and piped the output of that to gzip. My pipeline looks like this:
nice mongoexport –db mydb –collection accounts –out – | nice jq -c -M ‘del(.phash) | del(.h[].phash)’ | nice gzip > accounts.json.gz
Whoever wrote jq, thank you.
The last time I tried creating a bootable USB flash drive, it didn’t boot. Today, I needed the latest Ubuntu, and found that Rufus (for Windows) creates usable bootable USB drives from ISO images.
…the internet of things means: the secret police have installed locks in everything and the criminals are now selling each other skeleton keys.
I had the opportunity to give an introduction to SaltStack at the OpenWest conference this week (Video on YouTube).
As I was setting up for the presentation, I realized I needed an HDMI cable, and there wasn’t one in the room. A conference helper found a cable at the last minute, and we started on time (thank you!).
From what the audience said, many people are interested in using SaltStack, but haven’t started yet. It’s a fantastic tool for remote execution and configuration management. The documentation is initially a bit intimidating, but it’s easier to get started than it appears — especially using one of he many online tutorials. And there are many examples available from saltstarters.org.
SaltStack releases for CentOS/RHEL have become more stable over the past 10 months, and I’m excited about it’s future. It has a vibrant development community, and they’re implementing cool new features to extend its capabilities, including:
– RAET, an optional new, secure UDP communications protocol, which will easily support more than 10,000 minions. https://github.com/saltstack/raet
– Proxy minions will eventually allow the configuration of load balancers and networking equipment.
And advanced features, already present, sound like they could be useful:
– The orchestration framework, based around the reactor, can allow configuration when certain events are triggered. For example, Jenkins, upon building successfully, could send an event from the Salt minion to the master, and the Salt Master could automatically deploy the build to a test environment.
– Custom module, state and proxy support. In /srv/salt, create a _modules directory, etc. They can either override the existing module, or add new ones.