Admin Admin Podcast #084 Show Notes – Git your stack here!

  • Al couldn’t make it for this recording cry
  • Jon broke his QNAP NAS with Debian. He doesn’t go into any details, and will leave it to another show (as long as he can remember what he did until then)!
  • Stu has been blogging, now on Consul, Saltstack and Prometheus on LOTS of different platforms.
  • Jerry started a new job. The CTO at his new firm is possibly a listener! His NAS has failed, and he’s building a ZFS mirror to move the data to. He used Syncthing to move the data off to another drive, and is using Backblaze to run a backup.
  • We discuss possible other uses of Syncthing, in particular, one YouTube creator talks about how he uses SyncThing for his video editing workflow (part 2).
  • Jon also mentions that he’s been watching some of Martin Wimpress’ YouTube channel, and in particular, the series where he created the Desktopify script for turning a Raspberry Pi Ubuntu Server image into a Desktop Flavour.
  • We talk about “Hashistack” (referring to the collection of tools released by Hashicorp, which are “Terraform“, “Packer“, “Consul“, “Vagrant“, “Vault” and “Nomad“). All the hosts provide summaries of how each of these tools work (except Nomad) and why you might use them.
  • We discuss using Git.
    • Jon talks about DangItGit (and a slightly more rudely named version of that site), and mentions a comic on XKCD about Git.
    • Then he mentions some of the things about git which may give it a bit of a bad name, like SubModules.
    • He also mentions that you can use “hooks” which are scripts that run before or after certain actions (like a commit or a push), and Stu talks about how he’s used that in the past.
    • Stu also talks about some of the tools in Github and Gitlab which are similar to hooks, that run when Github or Gitlab actions occur (like a pull/merge request being raised, or an issue being opened).
    • Stu also talks about CI/CD pipelines and Gitlab runners.
    • Stu and Jon talk about Pull Requests (Github terminology) and Merge Requests (Gitlab terminology). We all talk about Issues and Wikis within Github and Gitlab.
    • Jon talks about what a Fork is.
    • Stu reminds us that Git is not the only version control system, and that Subversion (SVN) is also out there. Jerry mentions CVS. Jon mentions Mercurial (HG) and we talk about where version control systems have come from.
    • We diverge into how Blockchain is similar to Git… and why it isn’t the same.

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