Archive for the ‘SysAdmin’ Category

Cisco WCS and Microsoft IAS

I’m deploying a Cisco Unified Wireless Network at the office.  It’s a cool, but complex beast.  Along the way, I’m learning lots and lots of stuff…. one of which is how to use RADIUS to authenticate users.  It’s an old but great protocol.  In my situation, I want the Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS) to […]

DOS Line endings break CGI script execution

Some fellows in another office asked for help figuring out why the CGI script they were writing wouldn’t run. Yesterday, I’d helped them find that the interpreter named on the she-bang line (#!) of their scripts didn’t exist and I’d recommended they use “#!/usr/bin/env perl” instead.  They did, but wrote the test.cgi script in notepad […]

Extending Xen VM size

Draft of notes so I don’t loose the method. On CentOS 5.0 from 2005. Xen vm images in /xenvms Task: extend the databases vm from 5 G to 56 GB. This wasn’t hard once I learned how to do it.  However, in this case, there were only two partitions on the device: p1: root and […]

Custom compiled samba drove me nuts.

A long time ago, someone compiled from source and then installed samba 3.0.7 in /opt/csw on a Solaris 8 machine we have.  I surmize that the person ran ./configure with “–prefix=/opt/csw” Today we wanted to do “net ads join” and couldn’t. We got /etc/krb5/krb5.conf right, we know it because kinit would work. But the /opt/csw/bin/net […]

Sauron….

Sauron seems cool.  Been out of development for a while.  I’ve installed 0.7.3 on a server at work to try it out.  It’s an IPAM – IP Address Management system that also writes BIND and ISC DHCP configs and zone files.  Backed by PostgreSQL.  Looks like it can manage a bunch of servers for us. […]

Apache UserDir cgi-bin configuration

I use blosxom as a simple blog at work. I have two bash functions that allow me to use the blog as a timelog. Whenever I change workstations, my blog breaks for a while until I get around to relearning how to setup cgi for user directory’s. This time, I’m writing it down! 🙂 First, […]

Fixing broken xemacs on openSuSE 11.2

One of our developers is using openSuSE 11.2 as his desktop machine and reported that xemacs from RPM xemacs-21.5.29.b604d235f028-1.1.1.x86_64 wasn’t working.  As soon as you start it, the status line at the bottom displays: Loading this file requires xemacs, (null(function-max-args ‘throw)) I goggled that and found a thread on the opensuse forums recommending we: zypper in […]

Corrupt kernel update breaks mkinitrd – cannot boot

We were trying to install a QLogic card and it’s drivers on one of our SLES11 servers this morning and mkinitrd kept barking at us: lebsvn2:/boot/grub # mkinitrd -v Kernel image:   /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.19-5-default Initrd image:   /boot/initrd-2.6.27.19-5-default Root device: /dev/root (mounted on / as ext3) Resume device: /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_FUJITSU_MHZ2080_K85CT9925KBH-part3 (/dev/sda3) Device root not found in sysfs […]

Simple file backup script for sysadmins

A friend of mine, Tony Krch, wrote this nearly ten years ago and I’ve used it ever since.  When ever I edit a system config file, like /etc/named.conf, I first do cd /etc backup resolv.conf Then I edit.  The backup script makes a copy using “cp -a” of the file, puts it in a sub-directory […]

SSL on Glassfishv2

We bought a real SSL cert for our OpenSSO server.  That means I need to “install it” on the Glassfishv2 installation that runs the OpenSSO app.  The new cert came with three other certs, that I now understand are the “chain” that legitimize our cert by associating it (somehow) with the external authority. After much […]