Sysadmin Ramblings

I’m still working with my own kvm implementation even though RedHat has released their own in RHEL 5.4, they are, however, at version 83, I’m on 88. I’d rather stay current since kvm is moving so fast that each new version fixes bugs and adds many new features. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a server that many people are mistaking for my login (ssh) machine, so I decided to forward attempts to ssh into this machine to my real login machine. I found a few posts on this but they were all somewhat incomplete for my purposes Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a talk I gave on creating/building rpms. It covers spec files and some basics of how an rpm is organized. Hopefully it’s useful to someone. This includes a tutorial on how to make a spec. I plan of having a more detailed tutorial in the appendix to mybook, I’ll post that here when I finish it. rpm-talk

There’s nothing special to do here, the only caveat is that you need to enable the non-free repo from fusion and install wl for the wireless driver. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, I accept a little bit of the blame for this one. I started to import my photos using picasa. The first three pictures that were imported were poor, so I decided to delete them. At that point they were the only pictures in the folder, so Picasa decided to delete the folder, even though an import was going on to that folder. All the rest of the pictures went into the abyss. Pretty lame IMHO. Picasa should probably check that it’s copying the files to a good location before deleting them from the card. Read the rest of this entry »

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…

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.