Sysadmin Ramblings

To list the package groups available in yum, you would use yum grouplist. When you are adding groups to your kickstart file, you use the id of the group not the name, so this *very* simple script lists the groups with their ids. Read the rest of this entry »

In the process of munging our RHEL5 kickstarts to RHEL6, we started getting this error “Partition requires a size specification”, the partition had a size of 0 set in the kickstart, with grow. Read the rest of this entry »

My problem is that I wanted to filter access on a raid array instead of doing it on the switch. I could login to the switch and figure out the linux hba’s wwn (world-wide-name), but I thought there must be a way to get it from the linux machine directly. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a problem with a filesystem that was full on a vm. The vm’s hard drive is just a lun on a fibre channel. So I resized the lun on the raid controller. The devices (/dev/sdx) for the drive noticed the new size after I did the usual scan and partprobe, but the multipath device didn’t see the new size and was working off the old size. After some digging I found this page on how to get multipathd to notice the new size. I’ll summarise here. Read the rest of this entry »

While attempting to monitor traffic on a qlogic Sanbox 5602 I noticed that the traffic (connUnitPortStatCountTxObjects) was being returned as a hexadecimal value with spaces in it (e.g. Hex-STRING: 00 00 00 00 01 4F E1 1B). Read the rest of this entry »

We often need to keep two directories on different machines synchronised. We would like the rsync to be secure and to only allow the rsync, no shell access. This method uses ssh keys with commands in authorized_keys. Read the rest of this entry »

We had a problem where new clients couldn’t get their keys signed properly by the puppetmaster. Both the client and the server were in perfect sync with our ntp server. date on both machines returned the expected results. We are running mongrel so I went down the wrong path of thinking apache was to blame for the time problem. It wasn’t until I started going through the certificate_factory stuff that I found the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

using fedora-ds/redhat-ds it creates cert8.db and key3.db to store the certs. I wanted to extract the private key as PEM so I could import it elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Was getting this error on our puppetmaster that only had a few clients. Read the rest of this entry »

We had a machine that would keep coming up with devXXXXX where XXXXX is a seemingly random number. Read the rest of this entry »