Introduction Couple weeks ago, I took a journey to centralize all our infrastructure logs in one location for the seek of ease to teams who needs access such logs. Diversity is a good thing, but it's a challenge when you have multiple devices in your infrastructure that generate logs in different formats and standards. While looking at multiple solutions and comparing them. We needed something that support Linux, Windows and dozens of network devices, a solution that easy to configure, automate and cost effective.

intro In this post, I will demonstrate how we can install HAProxy from source code. According to Wikipedia, HAProxy was written and still maintained by Willy Tarreau since 2000. HAProxy is free open source software (FOSS), that provides a high availability load balancer and proxy server for TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) based applications that spreads requests across multiple servers. It is written in C language and thus the reputation for being fast and efficient.

Donovan Brown wrote a good article showcasing how you can use a custom PowerShell function to navigate up directories without the need to type multiple cd .. . I find his idea interesting and could be of important time saver if you spend a lot of time working with PowerShell. Unfortunately (or fortunately depends how you see it) nowadays I don't use PowerShell a lot, and when I do my usage is limited to few PowerCLI commands, but I do spend a considerable time interacting with Linux Shell, so the natural thing to do is to port Donovan's idea into a Bash script.

According to Ansible's Best Practices, There are many possible ways to organize playbook content, and that the usage of such layout should fit your needs. The only thing I highly recommend is using roles instead of tasks, this will give your flexibility and better organization of your code. Ansible provide two examples of directory layouts. the first one is pretty simple and the one I go to when I am working on a small environement with a sample production and staging inventory files:

In this post, we look dive into some of the interesting way we can use Bash to work with file names and paths, this usually helpful when you want to put a quick Bash script to copy or move/rename file. I recently had to deal with hundreds of log files generataed by the dozens of containers, the issue was each container writes logs inside a folder, but the logs files are basically have the same name inside each folder.