Sysadmin Ramblings

We share our printers out from cups using samba. It was working great until a recent update broke the drivers from the windows/samba side. I decided to redo the configuration and use the cups driver for everything. Only problem was that after doing that I couldn’t add the third (optional) tray to our HP 2420DN. After reading a little about PPD and using cupsaddsmb to install the cups driver for windows clients, I came up with this hack job that appears to be working. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve had this dream for some time of having a display that we can control from our desktops but mounted in the hallway. The idea would be to use the sign in place of post-it notes or some other sort of messageboard arrangement. We’ve tried the Kodak EX811 in the past with limited success, we used mediatomb to control the kodak, but wheneverthe wireless network had problems or the kodak got confused, it would just go to a blank screen, hardly useful. Read the rest of this entry »

allmybase.com has a good article on how to get skype working properly on F11. If your sound keeps crapping out or your video doesn’t look quite right, check out his fix.

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 of “Crash, bang, wallop, what a server”. Enjoy…