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I happen to be someone that finds themselves setting up new systems for myself often. I have to remind myself there are tools that I need installed before the scenario in which I need to use them (on an airplane, during a crisis, etc.). I use a Mac so this list of software and setup is going to be very Mac OS X centric. From the web: Google Chrome Evernote - My brain lives here Google Drive - I keep some .files (dot files) here iTerm - My Terminal of choice Shuttle - Super awesome ssh config menu creator Little Snitch - I don’t trust any one or any code Shimo - Need to use more than one VPN? Shimo is for you GPG Tools MySQL Workbench - When you login to a MySQL server and say, “WTF?!?” you might want a GUI as a safety Witch - CMD + TAB will never be the same Rectangle - Position your windows where you want them Skitch - Screeenshot tool that saves to Evernote Dropbox CleanMyMac - I use this to uninstall software and clear caches (among other things) DaisyDisk - Find wasted disk Wireshark Postman Mercurial VirtualBox Vagrant SourceTree - I am using this less and less these days but still want it around Firefox Chrome Canary Firefox Developer Edition Safari Technology Preview Telegram VLC From the Mac App Store: ...

Like a lot of systems folks I use sed, a lot. It is probably an unhealthy amount of sed use but so be it. I operate on a lot of Linux servers but my desktop environment of choice is Mac OS X which means BSD tools (not the Linux-y GNU tools). The differences are relatively subtle between BSD sed and GNU sed. However, most of my work is done through iTerm (a literal black box). I frequently find myself diving down rabbit holes and I really do not want to have to remember the differences between BSD and GNU sed. I want the same sed everywhere so I compile GNU sed on Mac OS X: ...

Few things irritate me more than poorly documented dependencies. If your tool or software documentation states you can install your widget with one command and it does not work you are probably annoying people. Consider this a running list of tools and their often not well documented dependency chains. Feel free to chime in with your examples in the comments. Ansible Ansible is one of my favorite tools has many installation options. I tend to need the latest features so I end up using pip to install Ansible. On CentOS 7 and Red Hat 7 the Ansible dependency chain has been growing lately: ...

A few weeks ago a co-worker and I were discussing some things we really enjoyed about our work environment. It reminded me of a few key questions I ask (or things that I look for) during an interview that typically indicate whether or not a job is going to be a good fit or not. What do you use for e-mail? It is a simple question but the answer tells you a lot about a company. It should be a two part answer for technical positions. On the desktop side, the answer should be a SaaS or Cloud based solution (Google, Office 365, etc.). On the server or infrastructure side, the response should be “a vendor” or “a third party”. ...

Badlock might not be bad for all. If you are using Ansible you can patch your systems with a single playbook (or ad hoc command). For RPM based OS users Badlock (samba) patching is as easy as: ansible -m shell -a "yum update *samba*" all Or you can be very granular and use an Ansible Playbook to audit and patch samba packages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 --- - hosts: all tasks: - name: Check if samba packages are installed shell: "yum list installed *samba* | awk '!/^Loaded|^Installed/' | cut -d ' ' -f 1" register: yum_samba - name: Update samba if installed yum: name={{ item }} state=latest when: yum_samba.stdout != "" with_items: '{{yum_samba.stdout_lines}}' A similar Ansible Playbook for a Debian based system would look something like this: ...