Josh Olson’s Blog

dhcpd died on Thursday night, thankfully nagios paged me stating it couldn’t reach any of our networks. I’m not sure whether or not this (cfengine dieing) was due to campus losing one of their main DNS, but as a precautionary measure I told cfengine to check that dhcpd was running every 5 minutes, and restart it if necessary [and notify me]. I also wrote a cron script to manually check dhcpd status every 2 hours [just in case] and mail me.

We’re officially moving Danielle from Marquette tomorrow. I’ve rented a uhaul and Josh, Nancy, & Dave were nice enough to offer assistance.

Craving more mutt functionality I was enticed by the mutt sidebar patch[1]. Instructions appeared simple enough, but it required a rebuild of mutt so I took the opportunity to build[2] an rpm. Having only made a few rpms in the past and wanting to do it in a manner that conforms with best practices, I used one of Josh’s spec files as an example. Red Hat’s How To documentation[3] was also helpful, although probably quite dated.

After building & installing mutt I appended the following to my .muttrc.

# Sidebar settings
set sidebar_width=20
set sidebar_visible=yes
set sidebar_delim=' '
color sidebar_new yellow default
macro index b 'toggle sidebar_visible'
macro pager b 'toggle sidebar_visible'
bind index K sidebar-prev
bind pager K sidebar-prev
bind index J sidebar-next
bind pager J sidebar-next
bind index O sidebar-open
bind pager O sidebar-open
bind index B bounce-message


I like the sidebar a lot, we’ll see how long it lasts.

[1]http://www.lunar-linux.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44
[2]mutt-1.5.15-mtu.1.spec
[3]http://www.rpm.org/RPM-HOWTO/build.html

Josh & I spent some time this week upgrading our workstations to RHEL5 x86_64, other than a few oddities I believe we’re both happy about it. Exciting news - yum allows us to use public repos[1] with ease , this has really improved my x86_64 experience.

The rest of my week included [but was not limited to] the following:

• Updating all of our Solaris & Linux krb5.conf files so that they no longer rely on dns for realm / kdc lookups
• Auditing / updating our php.ini configuration files
• Messing with samba shares
• Setting up vncservers
• Messing with the abyss (account exceptions, secondary logins, etc)
• cron scripting

[1] Fedora 6 Extras

I learned about initrd yesterday, including how to properly create one should I blow it up. It is essentially a gzip’d cpio archive of important kernel modules / files, very neat. We also learned about PAM, NIS, & LDAP.

After training we purchased space pens and visited Cabelas. We had dinner at Olive Garden.

New command: mkinitrd

Last night included Trader Joe’s & Famous Dave’s BBQ.

Today we learned about ACLs, quotas, software RAID, LVM, SELinux, & kickstart. I’m excited about new SELinux knowledge as everything I’ve been exposed to up to this point has been “SELinux breaks things, and no one knows how to fix it.”

Tonight we went to Northern Brewer [Josh Myles purchased a brew kit], then had dinner at a Thai restaurant.

After driving around / visiting places for food, etc. we’ve come to the realization that each establishment in Minneapolis describes their business in great detail.

Example: Mackenzie - An American bar with a scotch flavor.

Almost every establishment is like this, it’s crazy.

Day one of training is over - I learned a new command: ip

This morning I spent some time installing acroread (Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux) on a server, I was having troubles until I added the Red Hat extras channel to the group that the server resides in.

I golfed a 60 (24 over par) at PLGC today, my game is starting to improve. Afterwards I had lunch at the Pilgrim River steak house.

This afternoon consisted of wiring and programming PXEs for the GeoWall. I also installed some drivers, and fixed the grub boot loader.

I’m heading to Marquette tonight (Danielle is graduating tomorrow) and then leaving for Minneapolis on Sunday morning.

I signed up for a golf course for the first track of the summer. Today I processed my student bill, which required me to complete the following steps:

• Print my bill
• Have my supervisor sign it
• Have HR approve and sign it
• Take the twice signed bill to the cashier office

While I was there, I noticed that they had a business card, but instead of a name, it listed the following information.

To make payments by MasterCard/VISA/Discover,
go to: https://www.very.long.url/with/very/long/weird.Strings_INit

I’m considering recommending the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection

After lunch with Josh & Nancy in the DOW atrium I resolved a few rt tickets, learned about Magmasoft, the license server associated with it, and submitted the mtusysadm minutes from last week’s meeting.

I’m looking forward to Red Hat training in Minneapolis next week (7 - 11 May).

Stacked, racked, and kicked our first 2950 today, it’s going to be an IDL cruncher for one of our departments. They’ve got a fancy new swing arm in back that keeps the cable management arm from swinging out too far. I spent some time customizing a kickstart file for flexruns, there were a few quirks, but everything appears functional now.

Flexruns is currently using RHEL4U4 as our campus RHN proxy is still not RHEL5 compatible.

Josh Myles has an RPM for IDL, it works great as long as you remember to install the i386 version of xorg-x11-deprecated-libs.

# up2date xorg-x11-deprecated-libs –arch=i386

Modified eecn-vpn1 /samba/ configuration files, as well as the rest for future
samba daemons.

Joined eecn-vpn1 to the domain, it’s now authenticating against kerberos.

Moved /samba/common configuration directory to cfengine, wow my first cfengine
powered production service.

Created a few account exceptions, checked some things out on the abyss.

Had lunch with Josh, Nancy, & James. Learned about praising cheese.

Still practicing Limoncelli’s To Do & time management techniques, still
haven’t read his book.

Created a new nagios service group for our routers (called “network”), nagios
should now page me when it loses the ability to talk to either subnet.

Started organizing the kitchen in the new house, it’s finally starting to
resemble a kitchen. The refrigerator is old & loud, I hope the landlord
replaces it after a few rent payments / complaints.

Installed wordpress last night - this will be my weblog.

Overall a good day, finally feel like I’m accomplishing something.