Music Free Tech

I’ve been working in IT since the late 1990s and have been a full time systems administrator since 2000. In this blog, you will find a number of things. First, I’ve documented a few things that I’ve learned over the years. Second, this is a place for me to blog about various tech related things.

Installing Password Gorilla on Fedora 14

Date: 13 December 2010

Categories: fedora

I switched to Fedora 14 on my laptop a few weeks back. It’s been working great but there’s no package for the Password Gorilla which I use to keep track of passwords. Fortunately, installing from source is easy. yum install tk itcl Now that the prereqs are installed, we can grab the source. I checked out the code from the git repository but you can get the tarball. Since gorilla is a TCL app, there’s nothing to compile.

Chasing the "tail"

Date: 01 December 2010

Categories: powershell

While trying to get System Center Configuration Manager to install a package on a new server, I rediscovered why I hate working in Windows and why I like PowerShell. I wanted to check the end of a series of log files to see what was going on. Unfortunately, Windows has no obvious analog to the unix tail command. Fortunately, my friend Jon Angliss had most of a solution. Get-Content <filename> -wait That’s close to what I want but not quite.

IPv6 Tunnel Setup Script

Date: 23 October 2010

Categories: IPv6, linux, tunnel

I recently set up a IPv6 tunnel with Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker. Once your tunnel is created, HE provides instructions for setting the tunnel up on your system. Easy peasy. I decided that I wanted to setup a tunnel on my laptop. That’s a little tougher since my laptop will be getting a dynamic IP from the various wireless networks I connect to. Even more fun, since most wifi networks I connect to in hotels and airports, etc.

Fun with Mutt, Irssi and Screen

Date: 30 September 2010

Categories: irssi, mutt, screen

One of my problems at work is that I always want my mail and chat windows visible while I’m working. Sure, I could set up multiple windows and hope they stay where I put them. But it’s a pain to set those windows up every time. Since I’m using mutt for email and irssi for chat and instant messaging with bitlbee, I thought, why not use screen to organize the windows and, as a special bonus, I can pull up my session from anywhere over ssh.

RT in Emacs

Date: 30 September 2010

Categories: RT, emacs

There are a number of ways of using RT from within emacs. A quick google search will find them. Here’s what I use. RT First, you’ll need to snag a copy of the rt perl script from /opt/rt3/bin/ or from the source package. This can go almost anywhere on your local system but I put it in $HOME/bin/. Make sure you make it executable. Next, create $HOME/.rtrc. This will contain the information rt needs to access your RT install.

Life with KVM: Networking

Date: 20 October 2008

I spent a couple of days a while back trying to figure out why I was seeing bizarre bridge and network errors in my KVM host’s syslog and a VM that only two of three NICs worked at a time. Turns out that there is a very simple fix for both problems. First, let’s start with the KVM host network configuration. Here’s the basic config for a host with two NICs.
One of my criteria for choosing a virtualization platform is that it had to run Windows and Linux guests. Linux, of course, works out of the box on most VM hosts. Windows is a whole other story. The good news is that Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 work just fine on KVM. There are, however, a few weird things that I’ve noticed so I thought I’d share some of them with you today.

Life with KVM: Live Migration

Date: 20 September 2008

Categories: kvm, virtualization

I thought I would take a few minutes and share some of my experiences with Linux KVM. In this first post, I’d like to share some things about live migration. First, live migration works great … if you have the right version of KVM. Kvm-69, which is included with Ubuntu Hardy, is broken. Starting with kvm-70, live migration works again and works very well. You hardly even notice at all if you’re logged into the machine remotely while it migrates.

Virtualization From the Trenches

Date: 07 September 2008

We’re in the process of trying to virtualize our data center at work. I was given the task of testing and evaluating the various VM technologies. I have to say that I am not impressed. VMWare ESX Let’s start with the big player in the VM world, VMWare ESX. The Banner team uses ESX for a few of their servers. ESX stood head and shoulders over everything else that I looked at.

Static Home Directory Rant

Date: 01 January 2007

Categories: courier, maildir

Ok, I have to get this off my chest because, 1) it drives me fracking bonkers everytime and see it and 2) I want a place I can point people at when they ask why this is a bad idea. What I’m talking about is the excessive number of HOWTOs that think it’s a good idea to use the same home directory for all virtual users. Most of these HOWTOs discuss using postfix with courier, but I have seen courier-mta HOWTOs that do this too.