Stupid Puppet Trick: Poor Man’s Undo
If I apply a set of classes to a puppet client, I may need to roll back those classes’ changes later. Granted, I could just edit out those classes, reformat the system, and rebuild it from scratch, but...
View ArticleStupid Puppet Trick: Identifying Groups of Hosts
My Ruby skills are practically non-existant, but I’ve managed to put together a relatively readable custom fact for identifying my Torque queues by a node’s hostname. Behold, HostgroupFact! Now I can...
View ArticleNagios check_smb and Windows Server 2008R2
We’re in the midst of upgrading our Windows Server 2003 servers to 2008R2. Three down, one to go. We noticed that the 2008R2 servers threw errors back to Nagios that the 2003 servers never exhibited....
View ArticleProtected: Virtual systems and networks with VirtualBox
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View ArticleProtected: Version control
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View ArticleProtected: Ad hoc change tools: bootstrapping puppet client and ssh on the...
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View ArticleProtected: Directory servers: DNS and DHCP
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View ArticleProtected: Authentication servers: winbind and Kerberos with Windows Server...
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View ArticleProtected: Puppet manifest cleanup 1: making public services automatically...
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View ArticleProtected: Mail servers: Postfix, Dovecot, and SpamAssassin
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View ArticleClient Configuration Management
Back at the infrastructures.org mothership, client configuration management is described as everything that makes a host unique and/or part of a particular group or domain. And for Unix-like systems,...
View ArticleThe autostow is Dead, Long Live stowedpackage!
I had posted earlier about distributing stowed packages via rsync and puppet to my managed systems, but that method wasn’t quite what I wanted: There was one more file to manage outside my regular...
View ArticleStupid Puppet Trick: Agreeing to the Sun Java License with Debconf Preseeds...
I had a user ask for Java to be installed on the cluster systems, so I started up by making a simple JRE5 module for puppet, but this first one didn’t quite work: class jre5 { package {...
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Giving a Presentation at the Tennessee Higher Education IT Symposium
I’m heading to the IT Symposium this morning to give a talk on creating a managed Unix infrastructure from scratch, somewhat of a summary of several things I’ve posted here over the last year or so....
View ArticleMaking Solaris Packages from Commercial Software
Creating a managed infrastructure can go pretty slowly when you’re beset with a combination of bare competence and a work schedule that’s overrun with non-infrastructural tasks. So yes, it’s been just...
View ArticleSome Days, I Just Hate Solaris
Back in 2000, when some of us in engineering were talking about how best to improve our facilities for high-performance and research computing for our graduate students, we came to a few conclusions:...
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I Killed the Mail Server Today
It all started so simply: I was going to set up a little Xen instance to be my next cluster submit host, and needed a spare address for it: I started setting up an instance for ch208i.cae.tntech.edu,...
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