Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, science nerd, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I provide the low-end rumble and run sound for bands around West Sussex.

Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Back to the floppy: A musing on the passing of a once-common physical storage medium

Review of the Apollo Vampire 1200 v2 accelerator add-on card for the classic Amiga 1200 computer

Recent Posts

Tiller 0.5.0 released

Just a quick “heads up” for users of Tiller - version 0.5.0 has just been released and has a few new features, and some other changes. Firstly, I have added support for per-environment common settings. Normally, you’d do things like enable the API, set the exec parameter and so on in common.yaml, but as per issue #10, you can now specify / over-ride these settings in your environment configuration blocks. Simply drop them under a common: section, e.g.

Tiller 0.3.0 and new Defaults datasource

Tiller v0.3.0 has just been released, which brings a couple of changes. The first is that the ordering of plugins specified in common.yaml is now significant. Tiller will run these plugins in the order that they are specified; this is important as before the order was effectively random, so your templates may change with this release if you rely on merging values from different sources (hence the major version bump indicating a breaking change).

Solaris bash package and other updates

A quick update for users of my Solaris 11 x86 packages. I’ve created a GNU Bash 4.3 package which includes the patch for the much-publicized Shellshock vulnerability. As the package name “bash” also matches the one provided by Oracle, as usual you’ll just need to specify the full FMRI when installing:

Querying Tiller configuration from a running Docker container

Tiller 0.2.2 now brings a simple HTTP API that allows you to query the state of the Tiller configuration inside running Docker containers. This may be particularly useful when you’re attempting to debug configuration issues; you can quickly and easily check the templates, global values and Tiller configuration.

Building dynamic Docker images with JSON and Tiller 0.1.4

Tiller 0.1.4 has just been released, and brings a few new improvements. Firstly, you can now use -b,-l and -e command-line flags to set the tiller_base, tiller_lib, and enviroment values respectively. This makes things a little neater when debugging or testing new configurations on the command line.