Apr 03
Wow, that was painful. So much more painful than it needed to be. My Home lab environment is made up of four servers: A Dell PE1950 II with 4x1T drives — this runs the VMs for my home network. A Dell PE1950 III with no drives — this will run the VMs I need for …
Jun 22
Insert a witty comment about how it’s been so long since my last post. In my travels, I came across a handy file which I felt was share-worthy. Have you ever had a need to quickly test an SMTP connection via telnet or netcat? I have. If you don’t have a file like this already, …
Nov 16
I started a new job last month, and they issued me a MacBook Pro — the other choice was a smaller Windows laptop, and since I prefer the *nix environment I chose the Mac. I could make plenty of arguments or even just observations, since it’s been close to ten years since I last used …
Oct 23
I came across a new one yesterday; well, not really a new one, but a not particularly well documented one. It seems to be a problem that was found in CentOS 5, and has at least on some level persisted into Cent 6 as well. The problem as noted stems from attempting to raise the …
Apr 12
A few weeks ago I noticed that as a result of an upgrade, puppet-dashboard had removed itself from the system it ran on. No big deal, I wasn’t really using it and it put a number of more important packages on the removal list if I made the required changes to keep it. Since then I’ve …
Dec 12
Last night I installed Nagios 4 on an Ubuntu 13.10 VM running on my VMWare ESXi machine. I followed through the steps listed here, which worked overall: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Nagios_Core_4_Installation_on_Ubuntu_12.04.html I did run into a small number of issues which should be documented for anyone trying this on a later install of Ubuntu, but raymii isn’t allowing …
Jul 16
As users of puppet, occasionally we need to migrate nodes from one master to another. In my case I’m decommissioning my old puppet server having stood up a new one, as a part of my “migrate home” project. I ran into a couple of minor issues, but this is essentially the process for moving a …
May 10
Occasionally, as part of my day-to-day duties, we migrate users from one shared hosting server to another. In general we use the cPanel/WHM “Transfer account” feature. On occasion, this doesn’t work quite right and manual interventions must be made. When the Transfer Account feature breaks a user account, it’s annoying. Usually most of the transfer …