Sysadmin Ramblings

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 »