OCR of scanned pages on Ubuntu 10.04

Just for future reference: Scan images at 300 dpi (might be able to make this work at a lower resolution, but this is fine). For one sample page, this resulted in a 2348×3129 pixel image where each baseline height was around 50 pixels, and capital letters had a height around 30 pixels. Install ocropus 0.3.1-2 …

Nagios 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. Lots of: CRITICAL SMB anon access: Domain=[CAE] OS=[Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 7600] Server=[Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 6.1] errors. …

Setting up Project Quotas under XFS in Debian GNU/Linux

Quick and dirty notes for getting XFS project quotas running: I’m working on making storage areas for various capstone design class groups, vehicle teams, etc. I’d like to ensure that they don’t take an excessive amount of storage, too. These instructions are slightly different than what I’d found elsewhere, and I’m hoping to have someone …

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 …

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 …

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 to its …

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, …

Solution to a Vexing update-alternatives Problem

So I’ve got Debian packages made from lots of large proprietary software titles, but one of them (Hyperworks) had been throwing errors on several of the systems I tried to install it on, normally something like: Setting up hyperworks8 (8.1+0.2) … update-alternatives: slave link name /usr/bin/amfbuilder duplicated dpkg: error processing hyperworks8 (–configure): subprocess post-installation script …

Authentication Servers, the Next Generation

I’m mildly embarrassed by my previous setup authentication servers, but this one should be a vast improvement. A reminder of the existing constraints and conditions: Lots of Linux systems and a few Solaris systems, some of which dual-boot and aren’t accessible as *nix systems during normal hours of the day An Active Directory already in …