Appeal for advice: tying together Windows and Linux automation
I love the smell of new machines in the morning. I'm automating a machine creation workflow that involves several separate systems across my infrastructure, some of which involve 15 year old perl...
View ArticleI love Rome
I found this today: # hosts # Generate standard hosts tables. # Newnet doesn't really use it, it's just for easy reference. # Neither does oldnet now, since it's doing DNS right. # It lives on line 327...
View ArticleWell, this is embarrassing...
I found out today that I have been configuring Apache wrong for a while. How long? Around 15 years. ಠ_ಠEveryone who has configured Apache has probably done work with the <VirtualHost>...
View ArticleSecure remote desktop into Windows 7+ from Linux
More as a reminder to me than anything... Windows 7 introduced the Network Level Authentication option for remote desktop. The two options for remote desktop are: Allow connections from computers...
View ArticleDear Package Maintainers: Stop Being Clever
In the Linux world, there are two ways of treating a service/daemon installation. The Right Waytm (which is what Redhat does) is to install the service but not start it immediately. This only makes...
View ArticleCentOS joins forces with RedHat
This might sound a little bit gossipy, but I think it's important all the same, because it's going to have technical ramifications. As announced on the CentOS list, CentOS and RedHat have joined...
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RabbitMQ on Ubuntu via Puppet?
Ubuntu has a certain really annoying property. Alright it has several, but the one that I'm talking about right now is the insistence that it start services upon installation. While I'm never a fan,...
View ArticleJust what we need...another package manager
The rust programming language announced the release of Cargo, their new package manager, which will, "support the common lifecycle for packages", because we don't have enough of that already. Before I...
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Slackware is 21? Wow I'm old!
I saw that Slackware Linux is now officially old enough to drink (in the US, anyway). That's pretty amazing! Patrick Volkerding sent out the initial announcement that Slackware was being worked in way...
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Kerbal Space System Administration
I came to an interesting cross-pollination of ideas yesterday while talking to my wife about what I'd been doing lately, and I thought you might find it interesting too. I've been spending some time...
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DRACs and Macs and Java Hacks
I'm inherently lazy. Like, "I want a bottle of water, but it's all the way over there, so I guess I'll just dehydrate" style lazy. Our server room is maybe, MAYBE, 50 feet from my desk. But I've got to...
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Monitoring (old) Zimbra
It's September, and in universities, that means tons of new people. New staff, new faculty, new students. Lots and lots of new people. Here at The College of Computer and Information Science at...
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Impossible problems are the best
"I can't believe that!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't...
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Nagios Config Howto Followup
One of the most widely read stories I've ever posted on this blog is my Nagios Configuration HowTo, where I explained how I set up my Nagios config at a former employer. I still think that it's a good...
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Accidental DoS during an intentional DoS
Funny, I remember always liking DNS reflection attack, but this was just a sign of my not thinking straight. If that had been the case, they would have shut down inbound DNS rather than outbound. After...
View ArticleNew Technologies to Study from #LISA14
Well, I'm just now ending my first LISA as part of the program committee. This has been a long, long process (over a year, actually!) and I'm exhausted, but really happy that we had an awesome team and...
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Dealing with key-based authentication on Windows with Putty
I’m writing this entry because I’m going to be writing another entry soon, and I want to point to this rather than explain it in situ. Here lately, I’ve been using Windows on my desktop. At work, this...
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Reminder (to self, too): Use Python virtualenv!
I’m really not much of a programmer, but I dabble at times, in order to make tools for myself and my colleagues. Or toys, like the time I wrote an entire MBTA library because I wanted to build a Slack...
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Are you monitoring your switchports the right way?
Graphite might be the best thing I’ve rolled out here in my position at CCIS. One of our graduate students has been working on a really interesting paper for a while. I can’t go into details, because...
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So…containers. Why? How? What? Start here if you haven’t.
I tweeted a link today about running ceph inside of Docker, something that I would like to give a shot (mostly because I want to learn Docker more than I do, and I’ve never played with ceph, and it has...
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