Hi, I am Reset_Smith

I am a System Administrator
I enjoy working on servers
I am looking to work on fun projects
I love learning new tools
I hope this website can help others

Reset_Smith

IT Professional at CASAT

I am a IT Professional with over 10 years experience in the industry. As I’ve transitioned away from user management and more towards server and remote service management, I have been trying to document as much as possible. I’m creating this blog to help collect my notes in a centralized place and to generally play around with new things.

At my workplace we use WordPress to create websites for our various grant projects that we work on. My responsibilities are to deploy and manage the servers for these websites along with a few other web applications that we utilize. A lot of the documentation you find here is related to these processes but should be applicable for other web projects.

Linux

Bash

Apache

Windows

VMware

Powershell

Team Work

Hard Working

Leadership

Skills

Linux

I am familiar with using debian based servers and navigating from the terminal. I also have experience writing Bash scripts to automate processes and am familar with using version control systems such as Github.

Windows

I have experience managing Windows in an ‘Enterprise’ environment through the use of tools like Active Directory, Group Policy, and the System Center Configuration Manager.

Prometheus

I am capable of deploying, configuring, and maintaing a Prometheus monitoring stack. Along with Grafana, Loki and the related nodes for collecting and displaying metrics.

WordPress

I have several years of experience managing WordPress server stacks. And I am familiar with securing and troubleshooting WordPress in a business environment for Web Designers.

Hugo

Hugo is relatively new to me. Originally I picked it to quickly utilize my own Markdown notes from Github to create internal documentation. I liked it so I have been working on it now for my personal website.

Cloud Computing

I have experience working with several of the major cloud providers, such as DigitalOcean, Lindoe, and Amazon Web Services. I’m also familar with the creation and management of DNS records .

Recent Posts

Ansible: Automate your WordPress deployments

Ansible is a framework for automating deployment and maintenance of remote systems. This tutorial will go through the creation of my own WordPress playbook for Ansible. You can find all of my WordPress playbooks in Github in my Playbooks repository. The Playbook The WordPress installer playbook I created is the wp_install.yml playbook. The playbook handles the installation and configuration of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and WordPress on top of an Ubuntu server (Tested on 22.

October 10, 2022 Read

Ansible: Getting started

Ansible is an open-source tool for automating infrastructure and application deployment. I came across Ansible repeatedly while searching for a better way to manage my numerous bash scripts that I had been using for automating my deployments. Ansible allows for ‘infrastructure as code’(IAC) management techniques which in turn make systems more standardized and easier to manage. Why Ansible There are a number of IAC tools in circulation today, and I know I was overwhelmed with options when initially trying to select one to use.

October 3, 2022 Read

Setting up a LAMP server for WordPress 2022

This tutorial has been updated for 2022. In this tutorial we will walk-through the process of installing Apache, MySql, and PHP on an Ubuntu 22.04 DigitalOcean Droplet. The server created here will eventually host a WordPress website, I will indicate when settings are specific to WordPress and you can alternate from there if you are doing something different. These directions are for DigitalOcean but should be similar for most VPS providers.

June 25, 2022 Read

Prometheus: Installing the Blackbox exporter

Blackbox exporter is a tool to probe remote targets over a variety of protocols. Or from the Blackbox exporter Github page: The blackbox exporter allows blackbox probing of endpoints over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP and ICMP. In practice I use it to monitor connectivity to websites. Through the Blackbox exporter I can capture HTTPS response times, SSL certificate statuses, and some additional website metrics. Additionally using the Alertmanager tool it’s possible to create alerts based on HTTPS response times, HTTPS status codes, or SSL certificate status.

November 16, 2021 Read

Prometheus: Installing the Node exporter

Previously we installed Node Exporter on our Prometheus host. However in practice you will likely be installing Node Exporter on another VPS or other remote machine. The process is largely similar to installing it locally with a few extra steps. These directions go through the process I use for installing Node Exporter on remote virtual private servers running Ubuntu 20.04. To begin we’ll assume you have access to a remote machine/VPS through SSH or other ’terminal’ access with ‘sudo’ permissions.

November 9, 2021 Read

Prometheus: Getting started with Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus is an open-source application created for systems monitoring and alerting. The Prometheus server application can produce limited visualizations of data that it collects and stores from Exporters which send it the data. Prometheus and it’s Exporters are good for measuring numerical values over time, things such as: Data Storage/Memory Usage, Network Stats, and Process Monitoring. An example of Prometheus Black Box Exporter data displayed through a Grafana dashboard

November 5, 2021 Read