Linux

howto setup an install server using pxe, tftp, dhcp, kickstart, dns, yum (createrepo), puppet, augeas and func

I've finally posted the initial version of my "howto setup an install server" book at narrabilis.com. I start with installing tftp, dhcp and named to allow machines to pxebook. Then go on to configure kickstart to have machines install themselves. Then use kickstart to configure puppet and have puppet (with augeas) configure the machines. I briefly cover func, using func to quickly make changes. It's still a work in progress and I welcome any comments. Hopefully it will be useful to someone, somewhere. It's still lacking a good title. For now I'm going with the Alan Partridge title…

installation of raritan multi-platform client on linux

This is a one liner...but some people here didn't know what to do with the zip file that MPC comes packaged as. [root@server] unzip StandaloneMulti-PlatformClient*zip Archive: Standalon... extract mpc-install.MPC_*jar [root@server] java -jar mpc-installer*jar The multi-platform client is a nice java gui to access the DominionKX line of IP KVM switches. I find it works better than accessing the switch through firefox.

making an selinux module quickly

In this example I was trying to serve files up from samba and lighttpd at the same time. I made the type for the files samba_share_t. After that, lighttpd couldn't access the files. I needed to make an selinux module to fix the problem. Here are the steps to create the module quickly.

First, I seeded the audit log by trying to access files from lighttpd, then I looked at the last few lines of audit.log and made a module using audit2allow.

[root@server ~]# tail -1000 /var/log/audit/audit.log |audit2allow -m lighttpd >lighttpd.te [root@server ~]# cat…

virt-manager cannot select shared physical device when configuring network

I use puppet to keep my machines in sync with each other. Our default configuration has haldaemon and messagebus (dbus) off. I ran into a problem when I tried to create a new vm and there was no option to use the shared phyical device (the bridge) In order for virt-manager to see the bridge, I needed to have haldaemon and messagebus turned on. Silly problem, but I couldn't find the answer without using strace myself...hope that helps someone.

using puppet

A talk I gave on using puppet. I cover installation and initial configuration. It is a talk not a tutorial though, when I get a chance I'll post a short tutorial...

using puppet

using kvm

A talk I gave on using kvm. I have a video on doing a live migration at the end of it (you tube). I use virsh to perform the migration and watch the movement with virt-manager.

using kvm

Using lvm only on specific drives (Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...)

On our kvm hypervisor we have several vm's using fibre channel for storage. The hypervisor has to see all the devices, but each device has it's own lvm so when the hypervisor boots, it tries to read all of them.

To fix this i restricted lvm to only use sda (documented in lvm.conf). If you are stuck at the vgscan stage
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Then you probably need to do something similar to this. devices { dir = "/dev" scan = [ "/dev" ] preferred_names = [ ] filter = [ "a|/dev/sda…

iPod not recognised by Songbird (Fedora 11, Songbird 1.1.2/1.2)

I was trying to get Songbird to recognise my ipod and it wouldn't because the ipod was automounted under /media. I put the UUID of the iPod_Control partition in my fstab. I used blkid to get the UUID of that partition. [root@server0 ~]# blkid /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdc2: LABEL="IPOD" UUID="ABCD-1234" TYPE="vfat" I then put the UUID in fstab UUID=ABCD-1234 /mnt/ipod vfat user 0 0 After this, I ejected the iPod using "eject /dev/sdc". Reinserting the iPod i then mounted the iPod using "mount /mnt/ipod". After all that I restarted…

GNOME kiosk session in SunRay SRSS 4.1 on RHEL5

After installing SRSS we tried to setup a gnome kiosk session. There were no prototypes for this installed. After scouring the net we only found an example of something that didn't work :-(. Here is our config.

/etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/gnome.conf KIOSK_SESSION_EXEC=/etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/gnome/gnome-kiosk KIOSK_SESSION_LABEL="GNOME" KIOSK_SESSION_ICON= KIOSK_SESSION_DESCRIPTION="GNOME" KIOSK_SESSION_APPLAUNCHER=/opt/SUNWkio/lib/kioskapplaunch KIOSK_SESSION_PROTOTYPE=gnome KIOSK_SESSION_ARGS=/usr/bin/gnome-session

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Using generic drives in a Netapp FAS250

We use a retired netapp as a backup with snapmirror. We don't have support on the device anymore and one of the disks failed. I took the drive out and discovered it was a SEAGATE ST3146807FC. I found this site that said it was possible to flash the firmware on a generic drive for use in a network appliance.

Since out FAS250 does not have a shelf of disks as vardomskiy is using in his example, I had to find a way to connect the SCA40 drive to a host controller.

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