Being in a large corporate environment has positives and negatives, one of those negatives is that many companies use HTTP proxies to control and track internet usage from your work machines. While in most cases this is very important from the HR and workplace productivity side, it can become a headache if you actually need something outside your companies firewalls that is blocked. In my case I wanted to backup some configurations and code to my home machine. To do this I’d generally just rsync over ssh or scp the files over to an off site machine. Sadly with a full firewall up and all traffic required to go through HTTP proxies, I had to find a different solution. In my case, I decided to use ‘corkscrew’.
Read more…
So you’ve had to replace a main board in your IBM blade, we’ve all been there. Generally, should you have asked for your friendly neighborhood tech to come out, he will kindly update your fresh motherboard with the original machines serial number and machine type/model number. If you’ve ever watched him do his work, you know on earlier blades he used the BIOs update utility from IBMs website to update that information. Well times have changed, this is no longer an option on UEFI and IMM based blades. Before you go and call IBM, you can use IBM’s ASU utility to update them. When I called they actually sent me an in house bootable ISO, which ended up just booting Linux and running a shell script that ran the following two commands:
Read more…
So you want to move your Linux workstations to RHEL5 but still use Insight II? If you have tried (and I know you have), you know that because of the jump in the version of GLIBC to version 2.5, Insight II won’t run. As much as we wish Accelrys would go and compile it against RHEL5, that won’t happen either. So, what does it take to get it to run? RHEL4… No, really. But we are going to be cute about it. Since all Insight needs is a few libraries to run, its just a matter of putting it in a place where it can get to them. My solution to this was making a small chroot environment in which to start up Insight in. Read more…
Since I failed to find a good description of how to do this on the web, I thought I’d share my recipe for using puppet to manage tripwire. This method will take care of running the initialization on the first puppetd run on a new machine, and update the policy file if its changed. It also has puppet managing your site.key, twcfg.txt, twpol.txt, and the daily cron to run the checks. Its an extremely simple setup, but gets the job done.
I’ll start with the tripwire.pp file for puppet, in this file you’ll define your tripwire class and associated files and packages:
Read more…