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{ Category Archives } Debian

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, since it was no longer on the Xen host like it was several months ago. Crap, the reason it’s [...]

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. Thanks to the folks on #puppet who read over them and gave editing suggestions.

Slides for presentation
Handouts for presentation

Update: So [...]

Stupid Puppet Trick: Agreeing to the Sun Java License with Debconf Preseeds and Puppet

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 { “sun-java5-jre”:
ensure => latest;
}
}

It doesn’t work because Sun wants you to agree [...]

Client File Access

The infrastructures.org folks list two primary goals of what they call “client file access“: first, consistent access to users’ home directories, and second, consistent access to end-user applications. Some of the things they warn against, such as automounters and the /net directory, we never thought of using to begin with. Their need to consider systems [...]

Watching Remote System Status with Nagios and NRPE

I know I’m late to the game with this part of my setup, but nonetheless, I’m happy with the results. The short form of it is that Debian’s nagios-nrpe-server package lets my central Nagios server keep track of my clients’ disk space, load averages, etc. Granted, I already had most of that visible through Ganglia, [...]