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Archive for the ‘Sysadminery’ Category

The fallecy of concatenation

May 9, 2008 Leave a comment

Whenever I discuss configuration management with anyone that is new to the concept, and even some people that have been doing it for a while.  There’s one concept that comes up that I have to argue with people about incessantly.  It’s this concept of concatenation.  Basically what people want to do is have this stub of a file be global, this other stub only effect this particular subset of machines, this other stub affect this other subset, then finally a stub that’s host specific. Read more…

Using a custom CA in MacOSX

May 2, 2007 Comments off

I’ve done this twice now and both times tried to look it up and got nowhere, and figured it out on my own.  Write it down stupid!

  • download the custom CA cert from wherever it may be
  • double click it, it will launch Keychain Access
  • add said cert to the X509Anchors chain
  • restart any apps that are going to look for that cert

That’s it, easy in a mac kinda way.

Categories: Sysadminery

Password Management

December 7, 2006 Comments off

In doing some reading I found the pwsafe password database.  There are quite a few things out there to manage passwords, but I like this one because of it’s copy/paste integration and that you can dump the db to text pretty easily to share it with others.  In my field you always end up with some way of sharing root passwords etc with other people that you work with in some secure manner.  My favorite has always been gpg encrypted files, it’s easy it works, it’s platform independent for the most part.  This lets you combine that with a common format and a little more ease of use.

Categories: Sysadminery

Configuration Management

November 28, 2006 Comments off

Configuration Management has been a interesting topic to me for quite some time. To me it does a couple of things, not only does it make life as a sysadmin much, much easier. But also it combines scripting and code development with system configuration. Read more…

Categories: Sysadminery

SSH and Screen

November 16, 2005 Comments off

I nabbed this from off google to solve the same problem. You are using screen and you disconnect and come back later and all your ssh auth sessions are broken. I modified it a bit to be friendlier about locations.

if [ ! -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then
    screen_ssh_agent=/var/tmp/${LOGNAME}/state/ssh-agent-screen
    if [ "$TERM" = "screen" ]; then
        SSH_AUTH_SOCK=${screen_ssh_agent}; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
    else
        if [ ! -d "$(dirname ${screen_ssh_agent})" ]; then
            mkdir -p $(dirname ${screen_ssh_agent})
        fi
        ln -snf ${SSH_AUTH_SOCK} ${screen_ssh_agent}
    fi
fi

Enjoy…

Categories: Sysadminery

Mod Rewrite

November 14, 2005 Comments off

Well I think I understand it now, at least better than I did before. As with most things apache it’s a matter of experience and trial and error. But I’ve got things working the way I wanted them. I guess everyone’s advice about mod_rewrite is true… Stay away whenever possible.

Categories: Sysadminery

Graphs, Graphs, Graphs

November 10, 2005 Comments off

After doing alot of graphing work at well… work. I decided to get it setup at home. The parltry amount of traffic makes them not very interesting but it was a good learning experience. Cacti is a much better replacement for mrtg. Loads easier to setup and does better graphs to boot. An even more obscure use of rrdtool can be found in mailgraphs which is neat though completely pointless . Just serves as proof that my email of 7+ years gets alot of spam.

Categories: Sysadminery
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