18 January 2018

IBM Champion 2018

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I am very grateful to have been selected as IBM Champion for the 2nd year running.




IBM defines the IBM Champion program as "recognising these innovative thought leaders in the technical community and rewards these contributions by amplifying their voice and increasing their sphere of influence."

More info here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK9g3hrK6lc

It's very humbling to be among some of the people of the IBM community who I've looked up to for a long time and have learned from and shared with. I'm also very proud that ISW have 3 IBM Champions for 2018 - Adam Brown and Jay Agrawal.

10 January 2018

creating Docker Images for IBM Digital Experience

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Following a couple of leads from Amir Barkal and WASdev - I've managed to create a fairly small (ish) Docker Image with a fully working instance of IBM Digital Experience (WebSphere Portal).



This was in response to a customer requesting a repeatable, easy, portable and disposable method of spinning up DX instances for development and testing of apps, features etc. as part of a wider continuous delivery model.

Docker Files and instructions for building the image are on my GitHub.
I created this image on a CentOS 7 server - and pushed it to DockerHub (private repository) so it can be pulled from anywhere. I was able to pull it locally on my MacBook High Sierra running Docker, and tested it on Docker for Windows 10 as well.

NOTES:

  • The instructions assume that you are licensed to use IBM Digital Experience - so you'll need to download the parts from Passport Advantage using your IBM ID.
  • The finalised image is around 4.7 GB - on an fairly sluggish internet connection it took me about 60 minutes to pull the image.

27 December 2017

Mounting shared folders from a mac on a Linux guest VM

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Quick Problem: needed to get a large zip file sitting in a shared mac folder on my CentOS machine (VM guest)
Yeah I could go through the vmware tools install and all that, and there's probably newer ways to do it - but here's a quick way that still works with macOS High Sierra:

On your CentOS/RHEL guest:
(use sudo if you have to)

  1. yum install cifs-tools
  2. mkdir -p /mnt/yourFolderName

    example: mkdir -p /mnt/macshare
  3. mount -t cifs //yourMacNameOrIP/SharedFolderName /mnt/yourFolderName -o username=macUsername,password=macPassword,nounix,sec=ntlmssp

    example: mount -t cifs //192.168.0.1/Downloads /mnt/macshare -o username=jared,password=nottellingyou,nounix,sec=ntlmssp
  4. don't forget to insert a "\" in your password before any special characters in your password (which there likely will be!)

    example: a password of Hell0Wor!d would be Hell0Wor\!d
This took me 2 minutes to configure and worked with CentOS 7 and mac High Sierra - if you know a better method please let me know :-)

19 December 2017