4 Years of Blogging!

rstaatsIT General0 Comment

Well it’s that time of year again when the domain renewal happens the holidays are about to wrap up and the year is about to come to a close. This week marks 4 years since I started this blog. When I set out to create this blog I was about a year into my first real systems administrator job in a mostly windows environment for about 100 users and managing a 4 node VMware ESXi cluster and a decent number of VMs as well as lending a hand at another site here and there. During this year I had also made my first foray into Linux and AWS and jumped into the world of DevOps. Fast forward 4 years and I’ve become almost exclusively a DevOps engineer working primarily with Linux. My career has taken me places I never thought it would, I’ve migrated large sites from on premise datacenters to AWS, on site at a large annual award show to work closely with content teams, and worked closely with development teams on the ground to help redesign and rebuild a video streaming service platform.

 

The purpose of this blog 4 years in remains the same as it started. Simply to help other admins/engineers with fixing odd and poorly documented issues, and to share cool tips and tricks that have been helpful to me in hopes of helping others. As this year wraps up I have a series blog planned for the new year around Ansible that should be a good 3-4 part blog. Drop me a comment if there’s something you’d like to see me cover in the new year!

Happy Thanksgiving!

rstaatsUncategorized0 Comment

Well dear friends in operations/systems/devops/sysops/SREs etc, it’s that time of the year again. The time when traffic swells, auto-scaling, monitoring, and all the hard work we do day in and day out matters the most. Oh, well and there’s turkey and family too. But for those of us in the trenches keeping holiday shopping online I raise my cup of strong coffee and wish you quiet pagers, solid uptimes, happy customers, and wish you a happy holiday weekend. See you on the other side of the black week!

 

And of course if you need some comedic relief….

Use Java 6u65-apple with SKDMan on Mojave/High Sierra/Sierra/El Capitan

rstaatsUncategorized1 Comment

If you work in and around the world of Java, Groovy, Spring MVC, Grails, or Gradle you are bound to use a tool like sdkman when juggling multiple versions of these applications. If you haven’t used it before it’s worth taking for a spin. You can run simple commands like sdk install grails or sdk use java 8.0.181-zulu. This is great except that Java 6 isn’t really supported in sdkman for Mac. Queue the simple workaround!

Install SDK Man if you are not already using it, link is here

Go to the Apple Download page for Java 6 here

Next you will want to open terminal and do the following:

 cd ~/.sdkman/candidates/java/

Next you will create the following symlink:

 ln -s /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/ 6u65-apple

If this is successful you should be able to see it in the list when running sdk list java. Next we can verify that this worked successfully:

sdk use java 6u65-apple

You should now see a green print statement that reads “Using java version 6u65-apple in this shell. You can further validate that its working by running java -version. Your output should resemble the below:

java -version
java version "1.6.0_65"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_65-b14-468)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.65-b04-468, mixed mode)