A WordPress website tends to slow down overtime when the author or admin continues to add plugin after plugin just to have a new shiny feature. Each plugin takes resources and when you multiply those new resources being used, by the number of visitors accessing your site, you can have real problems with your hosting provider keeping your website up. Especially when you have a spike in traffic, as my friend Megan found out when her name hit entertainment news outlets a few weeks ago.

Checking your load times and reducing them as much as possible is important if you want Google to increase its love for your website. It sounds simple enough, make your website load faster and Google will give it some brownie points. But how do you actually find the things that are slowing down your website and how do you make it go faster? It's a lot like tuning a car. And the same principles apply, if you like tinkering with cars and getting every ounce of performance by tweaking the air intake and the fuel ratio and all that stuff you'll be spending time in the garage working on that stuff. If you like the results that come from tweaking your car but you don't particularly like doing the work, you can always pay someone to do it. The same is true for websites and blogs. You can follow tips and advice and even tutorials you'll find online. Each time you adjust something you'll see results and over time you should be able to adjust your entire website and see how your traffic and visitors react. Or you can pay someone to help you optimize your sites.

[pq]Fine tuning loading times can take time and precise adjustments accompanied and directed by research and analytics.[/pq] But to get started, there are two places and things you can do. The first I'll mention applies to any website it's by Pingdom and their page tester tool is free. It's a time load testing website into which you'll enter your own blog URL and see how it performs. The screenshot above shows you the summary view of my consulting website's results. After the summary you'll find all kinds of goodies, like each script that loads and how much time each takes. This is particularly useful to help you trim the fat in all those extra plugins, widgets, badges and other stuff that ends up accumulating in your blog without having real purpose.

The other option and should be used in combination with the first one, only applies to WordPress websites. Using the P3 Profiler plugin, you can actually run a detailed load test from your WordPress dashboard.

The P3 Profiler plugin is free and it works great. It will tell you which plugins and what parts of your website are taking the most resources and longest time. With that information you can identify the plugins, scripts, widgets, badges or images that need to be optimized or removed altogether.

Google also has a performance testing tool but that is a topic for another day. If you're starting your blog out, you probably don't need to do this. But if you like keeping an eye on these numbers you could take a baseline of how fast your blog loads before you do anything with it, and repeat the test each month or so and see how your blog changes overtime.

The post Two easy ways to check your website’s loading time appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Why do hosts care anyway? All they need to do when adding a domain to your account is to let you add the domain, and if DNS sends someone to their site looking for a given domain that has been registered with them then serve up the page. Why all the hoopla!?

Thank you HostGator, thank you!

I love this because I can add domains quickly. It's useful because I can add a domain and start working on it BEFORE I need to redirect DNS (yes you can do that if you use your hosts file).

And yes, I can think of at least 3 reasons to do a verification prior to adding a new domain, but really they're all bogus so I won't even tell you about them.

The post Another reason I like HostGator appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

The software you pay thousands and thousands of dollars a year per employee just because "that's how you've always done it" may not be necessary for you. IN fact, like the author, I've moved many processes and organizations to the cloud and it always turns out to be easier and better than everyone expected. Read on...

To be realistic, we assumed that a minimal amount of customization would be needed to integrate applications and make minor adaptations. We asked our department heads to select these SaaS applications — we didn’t ask IT.  Obviously, IT was a valuable partner in the decision-making process, but we let department VPs make the final call because they owned those processes.

via Move to the cloud? The two decisions that matter — Tech News and Analysis.

Found this from my buddy Louie Baur on Twitter:

Move to the cloud? The two decisions that matter bit.ly/yu187C

— Louie Baur(@louiebaur) March 11, 2012

The post Move to the Cloud? The two Decisions that Matter appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

You know how to deploy jars and wars on tomcact, you can hack .htaccess for apache and even speed up performance with nginx or lighttpd, but guess who doesn't know or care about any of this? Your customer. They care about their bottom line and whether you can do the work or not.

Customers just want you to fix their stuff, they need you to get in and fix or update or change things around. To them these kind of changes are always "quick" and "should be really easy for you". But before you commit to any hard numbers on your quote or proposal, be sure you understand exactly what technologies you're working with.

This is where wappalyzer comes in. Wappalyzer identifies software running on websites. It runs as a Firefox addon, and it does one thing and it does it well. Wappalyzer tells you all the different technologies running on a website. This is crucial for webmasters, webdesigners and even systems administrators that run their own businesses because it allows them to identify the type of work and skills that will be required to complete the job.

A really skilled systems administrator or webservice company might be able to obscure some of these technologies (and you should for security), but most people don't, and even if they knew how, they won't. So you can run this addon on against a website and find out what's going on before you commit to the work or come up with your estimate.

In addition to the webserver, it also finds the type of traffic analytics software being used, supporting javascript technologies, additional sharing functionality and much more. It identifies: CMS, Widgets, Database managers, frameworks, caching tools, even the operating system!

It's easy to install, just find Wappalyzer on the Firefox addon directory and install it, reboot and then Wappalyzer just works.

Take a look at these examples of websites and what technologies they're using. The red dots indicate the system being used.

The one thing that it doesn't do is find the hosting company. But there's another tool for that, that will be another topic soon.

The post Wappalyzer Helps Webmasters Identify Software appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

• Updating from cron or automated tasks
• Updating from your terminal
• Update certain events from a logfile
• Updating Twitter from a low-powered computer, TTYtter runs on anything that has a web connection and can run Perl.
• Checking or updating when you're stuck at a slow internet connection.

Maybe you don't need a reason and just want to try it out? Maybe you're just more comfortable in the command line than in the graphical interface. No matter your reason, you'll be glad to know that you can now update Twitter from the command line. Or will you?

TTYtter has been around for a while now, and it seems to be updated regularly; last update happened just recently, in August. The reason I found this handy little app was because a couple years back, my buddy @skehlet and I ran some quick scripts that would update Twitter from the command line. That ability to use my script broke after Twitter made some changes to how apps authorize (earlier last year, see this reference article). The secret to authorizing to or with Twitter now is to use oAuth, and I haven't had time to learn a whole lot about it.

After my script broke, I went on the hunt for a new way to update twitter from the command line, but instead I found a full blown client. TTytter, a Twitter client for Perl. The application is pretty cool and you can get it setup quickly. You'll need Perl though, if you don't know what that is then stop reading now. This isn't for you, I promise!

If you're still with me, then you probably like torturing yourself with the command line,  just for kicks. So I'll tell you that I installed TTytter on my on my Dreamhost account and bam! I was up and running with TTYtter. I had a fully interactive Twitter client in the cloud, on my Dreamhost server.

Now I don't expect anyone to jump out of their seats with excitement about this, after all this isn't a replacement to your current Twitter client, nor should you try it as such, this isn't even new, but I am excited because I just discovered. But if I have you reading past my warning above, then you might find this tool to be pretty  amazing if you know how to use it. If you're interested in automation, and automatic searches and those kinds of things this might just be the client for you.

Just like most good command line apps, this one does something and gives you ouput, apparently you can also feed it something else, like the output from another script. Get my drift?

I'll let you read through all the guts over at their own website , but TTYtter could be that simple utility you can use to schedule updates from the command line, or via cron, or even automated tasks. I found it because I need to have a reliable way of updating a twitter account for a brand new project. I'll let you know how my experience goes. This will also help our Liberam project that I mentioned a couple months back.

This isn't for the casual user of Twitter, nor is it for the social media enthusiast, it really isn't for anyone that likes their afternoons and sanity... unless he or she likes things like Vim or Emacs, Perl or Bash, or get excited about connecting via ssh to wget stuff.

Oh yeah, and TTytter gets props for reacting in an intelligent way when out of old habit, I issued an "exit" command while still in command line mode. Old habits die hard right?

TTytter - Twitter client for Perl - http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/

The post TTYtter, yes Twitter from the command line appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Let's cover the difference between ID and Class when we're talking about CSS.

IDs...

• IDs should be unique per page.
• IDs are selected with the "#" symbol

Classes...

• Classes can be shared, multiple elements can have the same class.
• Classes are selected with the "." (period)

You can combine them and select a class and a specific id.

Use Firebug to help you debug your website on the fly, then transfer the changes to your style.css (or other) stylesheet.

Further (and better) reading:

• The Difference between ID and Class.
• Selector reference guide:
• Multiple ID & Class selectors:

The post CSS and HTML Basics appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you're looking for MySQL GUI tools, you might want to take a look at MySQL Workbench.

MySQL Workbench lets you Develop, Model and Administer MySQL instances from a GUI interface. You can point and click through almost anything you need. For somethings, there is nothing like the command line but these tools are getting better each time.

The images above are from MySQL Workbench for OS X. Workbench is available for Windows, Mac & Linux.

The post MySQL Workbench, GUI for MySQL appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

"The Cloud" buzzword is nothing more than a new term for the "Internet" so before you get to hung up about that, just remember that the cloud is just a marketing term to sell you onto these services like Apple's new storage service, or services offered by companies like Dropbox. Yes, they're good services, and they're amazing in their capabilities. I can save a picture to my desktop, and within seconds it will be available on my laptop, ipad and any other computer I want. Pretty cool if you ask me.

But maybe you don't want to have your stuff stored on somebody else's servers. That is all that "the cloud" is; somebody's servers on the internet giving you storage space and making it available easily. Recently Dropbox went through a privacy faux pas and this put a lot of people on notice. Do you really own your data once it's on the cloud? Only time will tell, my advice is to keep local backups and keep your very private information away from these services.

What if you want to have your data available across all your computers, but you don't want to trust online services to do this for you? Do you have alternatives? Of course you do; Open Source application Unison to the rescue. Yes, you could manually copy your files when you need them, but who wants to do that? I don't, and even when I try to use this method, I often forget to copy the files I actually need.

If you're familiar with Rsync, then you could call Unison, Rsync on steroids. Unison can keep data synchronized across networks, much like Rsync does, except it goes one step further to help you deal with conflicts and generally doing the right thing. It's available for all platforms, with Linux being the easiest one to use, then OS X and finally Windows being the last one. I need to let you know that this isn't for the faint of heart, it is a solid application but setting it up might require a little more than your usual click, click, agree, click installation procedure.

In OS X, you'll need to use Macports to get Unison; unless you want to build from scratch (and good luck with that). On linux, most package managers have Unison in their repos so you should be able to do something like "yum install unison" and on Windows, you'll need Cygwin to make it work.

Unison is really useful when you want to synchronize large filesystems and Dropbox or other services don't provide that capability or the cost would be prohibitive.

I use it to synchronize my entire clients directory between my iMac and my laptop, this way I can do work my big screen at home, and take it on the road when I work on-site at a client's office. Most of the files I work with are too large for Dropbox and I rather not put them on a server that I don't own or have control over. All in all, I use it to keep about 60 GB worth of data synchronized.

Once setup, unison is very handy and you can trigger it with a simple script command or you can even set it up to work automatically on a schedule. I've been using it for about a year now and it works perfectly.

If you want the benefits of sychnronizing your files across many computers, but don't want to use a public service, you should give unison a try. It might be just what you're looking for.

The post Little known Open Source gem to sync your files appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Part of your job as a System Administrator or Website administrator is to ensure the work you do is safe from attacks and vulnerabilities. Remember that movie where Michael Moore goes around in Canada trying to open doors because he heard that people there don't lock their doors? Do you remember what happened? It was true, many people simply didn't lock their doors and he waltzed right in to their living rooms. Michael Moore seems like a nice enough guy so it wasn't a big deal, but in the Internet people aren't that nice. In fact they're malicious, as many nice people as you know there are hundreds more literally out to get you, or rather, your webserver.

You're not in Canada

Leaving your server unprotected is like leaving your brand new car with your wallet on the dashboard in a crowded metropolitan city, like NY, Tokyo, Paris --someone is going to take it. People are looking for weaknesses and will take all you've got if you give them a chance.

Protect your server

Here are tips and advice to lock down your webserver and other stuff you might have running on it.

First things first. You have to address the underlying base first, the operating system. If your foundation is weak, it doesn't matter how strong your application is.

1. Remove un-needed users. As you provision your server, you may find that you've created a user to test this, or that, if you don't need a user, check the user's home directory and make a backup of any files you need, then nuke that account. There isn't a maybe option here. You either need it or you don't.
2. Establish a strong password for the remaining users. I know its convenient for you to create a user and give it the usual password you like; this isn't good. Instead of using a known password, use a strong password generator and change the passwords in any account that has login capabilities. Do NOT, I repeat do not write it down, email it or give it to someone else. Instead, use a password manager to save it safely and protect your password manager with a strong master password. LastPass for example allows you not only to lock your password database with a master password, but it also lets you lock down an individual record with one more prompt of your master password, just in case you forgot to log out or something when you go to get a cup of coffee and things like that.

1. Remove the ability to login for system and application users. Apache, MySQL, Postfix, and other applications have or require their own username to run properly. Chances are these users don't actually need
2. Update & configure SSH

. Linux distributions are getting smarter about shipping ssh configs with better settings than they did years ago, but it is still your responsibility to ensure the settings are properly configured for your environment. Furthermore, check for updates on a regular basis and stay on top of those.

1. Do not share passwords

. It is easy to give someone your username and password to do something really quick, then forget about it. Presumably, you trust this person, but what if they happen to write down the password somewhere, or save somewhere where it is insecure to do so. You see, they could become the targets for someone to get your password.

1. Configure your firewall to only allow exactly what is needed. Do I need to explain this one?

To expand on this, soon I'll post info about hardening Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, Linux, as well as WordPress, vBulletin, Wikis, maybe even Joomla and Drupal.

This is the first draft of a series of guides I'll be writing on how to lock down your stuff and hopefully make it more secure. Got a better way of doing things, why don't you send me an email or tell everyone in the comments below.

Photo by Rinaz, site seems to go up and down.

The post The hackers know this, but do you? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Installing Vyatta was extremely easy, I got their LiveCD, booted into it and ran their install script. The options and settings were very easy to understand and for the most part I chose all the defaults.

The hardware I chose for this seems ideal for the purpose although I am afraid it could overheat eventually, only time will tell. Its a small compact PC without any fans, the case itself acts as a heat sink, but it still gets warm easily. The benefits of this hardware is its size, it has a fast processor (1.2Ghz), 512mb of ram and 2x Gig nics. It's similar to the one pictured here.

Configuring it was a little bit trickier than installing it but with tons of help online, I figured out how to get started quickly. Although the Vyatta system has a WebGUI (you must enable it first), I chose to do all the configuration via the command line. When you're looking for help, there is a lot more information on how to do things with the command line. The system sits on top of Debian so I felt right at home on the command line, tab completion works and, much like other Open Source appliance-style sytems, tabbing completes your commands and shows the next available options.

In order to configure the Vyatta system, you need to feel comfortable with the command line; the system must be configured from scratch. There are no templates, or configured options, nothing works out of the box, you have to configure each ethernet card, then you have to configure the networking configuration between the two (or more) ehternet cards. I'm pretty comfortable in these type of environments but I'm not a networking expert and some of the firewall concepts were confusing, to say the least. At one point I gave up on trying to revert some changes and instead I reinstalled the whole thing. It only takes about 6 minutes to install, and after this I made a copy of the initial configuration so I could restore it quickly instead of having to reinstall again if I messed it up again. Luckily I didn't have to.

I should also mention that the documentation available from Vyatta is great and its available officially in PDF directly from them, there are also forums which seem pretty active with a sizeable community growing.

In addition to the official docs, I found this great guide to help me with the firewall configurations, and towards the end I found a simple configuration to simulate what a standard home router would do (look at section 6). I had found parts of the configuration described there previously at The Complete Geek's site. For starters setting up the NAT translation was enough to get my system working.

Just to confirm that my system was somewhat secure, I tried running an nmap scan against my IP. The scan revealed no open ports. I also used this site to run another scan, and the results were good as well.

Next I need to figure out:
How to configure the router to accept SSH connections from the outside world. I already changed the SSH port but I can only access it from within my internal network.
How to map ports to specific hosts behind the firewall.
Configure a VPN.
Fine tune firewall.
Set it to use NTP to update its time, and make it an NTP for my internal network.
Set webcaching on.
Configure dynamic DNS so I can host services behind it.

So much to do, so little time. Oh yeah, and check out some of the too hot for print ads in the community section of the Vyatta page.

The post Vyatta, OpenSource router appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

mod_headers - Required to set caching information on supercache pages. IE7 users will see old pages without this module.

Under most circumstances, fixing this warning is very simple. Simply install mod_headers and reload or restart your Apache server.

The post mod_headers Required when using WP Super Cache appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

...because of Google's open-source licensing, "others can use our software as a base for their own products if we fail to innovate adequately." True. Google is clearly betting on its ability to innovate fast, which is incidentally also the very thing that makes the prospect of seeing its code forked so remote.

The post Could Apache keep Google’s regulators at bay? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Installing Vyatta was extremely easy, I got their LiveCD, booted into it and ran their install script. The options and settings were very easy to understand and for the most part I chose all the defaults.

The hardware I chose for this seems ideal for the purpose although I am afraid it could overheat eventually, only time will tell. Its a small compact PC without any fans, the case itself acts as a heat sink, but it still gets warm easily. The benefits of this hardware is its size, it has a fast processor (1.2Ghz), 512mb of ram and 2x Gig nics. It's similar to the one pictured here.

Configuring it was a little bit trickier than installing it but with tons of help online, I figured out how to get started quickly. Although the Vyatta system has a WebGUI (you must enable it first), I chose to do all the configuration via the command line. When you're looking for help, there is a lot more information on how to do things with the command line. The system sits on top of Debian so I felt right at home on the command line, tab completion works and, much like other Open Source appliance-style sytems, tabbing completes your commands and shows the next available options.

In order to configure the Vyatta system, you need to feel comfortable with the command line; the system must be configured from scratch. There are no templates, or configured options, nothing works out of the box, you have to configure each ethernet card, then you have to configure the networking configuration between the two (or more) ehternet cards. I'm pretty comfortable in these type of environments but I'm not a networking expert and some of the firewall concepts were confusing, to say the least. At one point I gave up on trying to revert some changes and instead I reinstalled the whole thing. It only takes about 6 minutes to install, and after this I made a copy of the initial configuration so I could restore it quickly instead of having to reinstall again if I messed it up again. Luckily I didn't have to.

I should also mention that the documentation available from Vyatta is great and its available officially in PDF directly from them, there are also forums which seem pretty active with a sizeable community growing.

In addition to the official docs, I found this great guide to help me with the firewall configurations, and towards the end I found a simple configuration to simulate what a standard home router would do (look at section 6). I had found parts of the configuration described there previously at The Complete Geek's site. For starters setting up the NAT translation was enough to get my system working.

Just to confirm that my system was somewhat secure, I tried running an nmap scan against my IP. The scan revealed no open ports. I also used this site to run another scan, and the results were good as well.

Next I need to figure out:
How to configure the router to accept SSH connections from the outside world. I already changed the SSH port but I can only access it from within my internal network.
How to map ports to specific hosts behind the firewall.
Configure a VPN.
Fine tune firewall.
Set it to use NTP to update its time, and make it an NTP for my internal network.
Set webcaching on.
Configure dynamic DNS so I can host services behind it.

So much to do, so little time. Oh yeah, and check out some of the too hot for print ads in the community section of the Vyatta page.

The post Vyatta, an Open Source network router OS. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!

It most often happens when the machine which I'm trying to connect has been re-installed. There are other reasons why you might get this but the root cause of it is exactly what the warning says. Watch out! someone could be doing something NASTY!

More often than not, this is nothing more than an annoyance because I know that the system hasn't been compromised and there is no man in the middle attack. To fix this problem, usually you have two options: you can disable strict checking of the known_hosts file, and/or you could add an exception for the IP address(es) that you want.

The best way I found to get rid of this problem, without compromising the actual security check that this system provides is to actually use the ssk-keygen utility and alias it like this:

alias ch='ssh-keygen -R'

ch stands for "clean hosts" so its easy to remember. Now, next time I see the warning, instead of manually editing the known_hosts file, or adding insecure workarounds, I just run my alias and the IP Address in question. This removes the IP from the known_hosts file and lets you continue.

The post SSH Remote Host Identification has changed. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

For example, I've been working a lot on these two directories in my pxeboot server ((The xxxx is just a placeholder)).

/opt/xxxx/sources/linuxdistros/centos/x86_64/5.3
/opt/xxxx/sources/linuxdistros/centos/x86/4.4

Typing those in each time, using tabs, and even using relative paths can be quite a pain in the butt. So I set two alias to get me back to those directories quickly after I wonder off and need to come back.

I added these two lines to my .bashrc file:

alias nn='cd /opt/xxxx/sources/linuxdistros/centos/x86_64/5.3/'
alias oo='cd /opt/xxxx/sources/linuxdistros/centos/x86/4.4'

Then either source .bashrc, or logout and log back in. Now when I type "nn" or "oo" I get sent to those directories.

The post Alias your cd commands and save time appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Recently it got updated to version 1.3.4 3.1.5 1.4.1. If you're using a custom template, this upgrade most likely broke your installation. The reason seems to be that the upgrade removes or overwrites the view directory found under the wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/ folder.

If you use the automatic upgrade feature from WordPress, then you'll need to put back your template from a backup. If you're doing the upgrade manually then just be careful not to overwrite your template and you should be fine. If you're not using custom templates, then this issue probably doesn't affect you.

The post Fixing nextgen gallery after upgrade 1.4.1 appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

How do I remove all comments from a shell script? Should I use sed or awk to do global search and replace operations in a MySQL dump file? I think sed is the right choice for both of them for now.

The post Awk VS Sed appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

As always, these are notes for reference and they may not work perfectly for you, YMMV. Quick refresher...

Get Tomcat working, as we did in the previous post. I'm going to just add Jira to that. Make sure Jira's database settings are properly configured. Follow the steps to integrate Jira into an existing Tomcat installation and not standalone; lets get started.

Following these two documents. doc1, and doc2. ((http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/servers/tomcat60.html)) ((http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/install-war.html))

get the ear/war download for jira. I found the one I needed at (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/downloads/binary/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4.tar.gz).
tar xvzf atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4.tar.gz

I like making symlinks so things are easy to test and upgrade if we need to:

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ln -s atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4 ./jira
ln: creating symbolic link `./jira' to `atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4': File exists
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ln -fs atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4 ./jira
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ls -la
total 63044
drwxr-xr-x  8 root root     4096 Jun 19  2009 .
drwxr-xr-x  8 root root     4096 Jun 12 14:23 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 32722355 Feb 16 23:33 atlassian-crowd-1.6.1-war.zip
drwxr-xr-x  9 root root     4096 Jun 19  2009 atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 31659532 Apr 23 19:00 atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4.tar.gz
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       30 Jun 12 12:03 confluence -> confluence-3.0.0_01/confluence
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root     4096 Jun 12 12:01 confluence-3.0.0_01
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root     4096 Jun 12 14:38 confluence-home
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       15 Jun 12 10:10 crowd -> crowd-1.6.1-war
drwxr-xr-x  8 root root     4096 Jun 12 10:17 crowd-1.6.1-war
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root     4096 Jun 12 14:11 crowd-home
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root     4096 Jun 12 10:54 crowd-home.orig
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       32 Jun 19  2009 jira -> atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]#

After you extract it, the directory that gets created is considered $JIRA_HOME, for me that is /opt/atlassian/jira. Next up is to verify that entityengine.xml is correct. I didn't have to change anything in mine.
After you've verified the file, you can build jira. You should see this:

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 jira]# ./build.sh 
Buildfile: build.xml

init:

clean:

compile:
Created dir: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/tmp/build/war
Created dir: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-generic
Created dir: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat
Created dir: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-6
Copying 5896 files to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/tmp/build/war
Copied 4 empty directories to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/tmp/build/war
Copying 2 files to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/tmp/build/war

war:
Building jar: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-generic/atlassian-jira-3.13.4.war
Building jar: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/atlassian-jira-3.13.4.war
Building jar: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-6/atlassian-jira-3.13.4.war
Copying 1 file to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-4
Copying 1 file to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-5
Copying 1 file to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-5.5
Copying 1 file to /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-6

--------------------------------------------------
Deployable WARs generated: 

TOMCAT:  /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/atlassian-jira-3.13.4.war
GENERIC: /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-generic/atlassian-jira-3.13.4.war 


See  for install instructions
--------------------------------------------------
        

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 38 seconds
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 jira]#

As expected:

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 tomcat-6]# ls -la
total 33048
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root     4096 Jun 19 13:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root     4096 Jun 19 13:18 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33752893 Jun 19 13:18 atlassian-jira-3.13.4.war
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     1196 Jun 19 13:18 jira.xml
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 tomcat-6]# pwd
/opt/atlassian/jira/dist-tomcat/tomcat-6

root@XXXX_webapp_01 lib]# wget 
--13:20:22--  
Resolving www.atlassian.com... 63.246.22.200
Connecting to www.atlassian.com|63.246.22.200|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1500191 (1.4M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `jira-jars-tomcat6.zip'

100%[===========================================================>] 1,500,191   1.40M/s   in 1.0s   

13:20:23 (1.40 MB/s) - `jira-jars-tomcat6.zip' saved [1500191/1500191]

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 lib]# unzip jira-jars-tomcat6.zip -d ./
Archive:  jira-jars-tomcat6.zip
   creating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/carol-1.5.2.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/carol-properties.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/hsqldb-1.8.0.5.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/jonas_timer-1.4.3.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/jotm-1.4.3.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/jotm-iiop_stubs-1.4.3.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/jotm-jrmp_stubs-1.4.3.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/jta-1.0.1.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/log4j-1.2.7.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/objectweb-datasource-1.4.3.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/ots-jts_1.0.jar  
  inflating: ./jira-jars-tomcat6/xapool-1.3.1.jar  

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 lib]# mv jira-jars-tomcat6/* ./
mv: overwrite `./jta-1.0.1.jar'? n

You should now have a bunch of added files inside the lib directory for Tomcat. Next up we have to re-configure Tomcat. The instructions from Atlassian call you to make a Catalina/localhost folder, but because I needed one or Confluence as well, it already exists for me. I don't actually remember having to create it anyway, but anyway, moving on. You need to copy the jira.xml file that was built alongside the jar earlier and copy inot the localhost directory for Tomcat. It should be in the same place as the confluence.xml file.


[root@XXXX_webapp_01 localhost]# cp /opt/atlassian/atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.4/dist-tomcat/tomcat-6/jira.xml ./
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 localhost]# ls
confluence.xml  crowd.xml  host-manager.xml  jira.xml  manager.xml

Make sure you have your database ready with a username and password, and then fill out the jira.xml file as instructed.
Make sure you know your username and password, you can use MySQL Administrator for that:

Username and password go into the jira.xml, along with the database --tucked away in the jdbc:mysql url. Then we have to modify tomcat's server.xml to include Jira's context.
There was a problem when I tried deploying Jira for the first time in Tomcat, I had an extra line in the entityengine.xml file for Jira. I fixed it and also proceeded to make a few deviations from the instructions.
Rather than using the .war file, I exploded it into what became $JIRA_HOME and then I made the context for Jira point to that location. The instructions, I believe have you point TC to the war file. 
Now I have to integrate Jira to the existing Crowd instance. Since this is all for the same group of people, I do'nt need another directory, I simply need users and the application definition in Crowd.
Here's the document to help out http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA. 
Make the three groups:


Since I already have usernames in the system, I simply will add some of the administrator users to all three of Jira's groups. Notice, if you're creating users for the first time you need to have at least one user that belongs to all three groups for this to work. After you have the groups, and a user in all three groups you can define the application.
Define the application, make sure you add the Jira groups so the members can actually use Jira, I also added the group Crowd Administrators to this application.

After you've defined the application, we'll need to change a couple files and move a few more around to make this all work. Carefully follow the steps to integrate Jira and Crowd.
After you've defined the groups, the application, the users and have modified the crowd.properties file along with making the other changes outlined in the document, you should be able to restart tomcat and have Jira just work.
I had an issue at first, the crowd.properties file called the Crowd services url on its default port of 8095, I had to change that to 8080 since that is where Tomcat is serving this stuff. I also had to make sure that not only was the server's IP defined in the applications permissions, but also 127.0.0.1.
The post Jira installation notes appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
					
		
		
			
		
		
		https://notagrouch.com/os-java-update-fail/
		
		
		
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=430

					Recently the update for Java on my Macs failed to install. This is the first time I see an update from Apple not work on my machines. This happened both on my iMac and on my MacBook Pro. To fix this, I got the update directly from Apple and installed it manually, you can find...

The post OS X Java update failed appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
										Recently the update for Java on my Macs failed to install. This is the first time I see an update from Apple not work on my machines. This happened both on my iMac and on my MacBook Pro.

To fix this, I got the update directly from Apple and installed it manually, you can find it here:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac_OS_X_10_5_Update_4
It all seemed to work fine after that, I just had to install it as a normal application. I'm not sure why this happened.

Java for Mac OS X can't be installed
Java Update Failed OSX
Official Java download from Apple
Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 package
Usual yadda yadda to install
Install Succeeded

The post OS X Java update failed appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
					
		
		
			
		
		
		https://notagrouch.com/confluence-jira-crowd-install-notes/
		
		
		Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:54:45 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=349

					Another round of Atlassian applications installations, this time only Jira and Confluence with a Crowd backend for single sign on. We'll start with Crowd and Confluence, check out the series to find the Jira notes. Here are the notes I made as I went through this round of installation. It should be much simpler than...

The post Confluence and Crowd Installation notes. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
										Another round of Atlassian applications installations, this time only Jira and Confluence with a Crowd backend for single sign on. We'll start with Crowd and Confluence, check out the series to find the Jira notes.


Here are the notes I made as I went through this round of installation. It should be much simpler than my previous installation where there were numerous other applications installed. For this we need Crowd, Jira, and Confluence, along with supporting apps: Tomcat, Java, MySQL and maybe Apache.
This post may be in need of an update given that it was written in 2009
Get a Linux box. I'm using a virtual JeOS Centos 5.2 installation inside an Oracle VM manager.

Get yum working. We have a local repo for base apps, and added Dag's repo to get some extra packages.

Do a yum -y update all, you should always have the latest unless otherwise required. At least the lastest available from your package manager so things go smoothly. ((Sometimes it is necessary to use a specific newer or older version of a package. This tends to break package managers so be careful. I rather err for stability than the bleeding edge))

Install and configure Java.

Use the rpm.bin file from Sun to install Java ((If you're doing this in a non RPM based system, use the regular bin file))

After a few screens of licensing agreement, it will install Java and all the necessary rpms. Notice that

# which java
works because we used the rpm installation.

Set JAVA_HOME:

I know that the JAVA_HOME for an RPM system generally is /usr/java/default/bin, to find out, you can use a combination of which java, file `which java`, and tracking it down that way until you find it. The following steps show how to add this to all users under the /etc/profile. Before you add it there permanently, you could check it on the command line:
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 bin]# which java
/usr/bin/java
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 bin]# file `which java`
/usr/bin/java: symbolic link to `/usr/java/default/bin/java'
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 bin]# JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default/bin/
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 bin]# $JAVA_HOME/java -version
java version "1.6.0_14"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_14-b08)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 bin]#



We got the version of java by calling JAVA_HOME/java -version so this means it should work if we just add a couple lines to the /etc/profile. Then after loging out and back in, you should be able to run the commands we tested earlier without having to manually set JAVA_HOME
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# tail /etc/profile
        . $i
    fi
done

# JAVA HOME
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default/bin
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
# JAVA HOME END

[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# echo $JAVA_HOME
/usr/java/default/bin
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# java -version
java version "1.6.0_14"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_14-b08)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]#

From past experience, I know that it is better to use Tomcat if you're going to manage more than one Atlassian app, instead of using the standalone packages that Atlassian provides. Now we gotta install Tomcat, we're going with the latest 6.x version apache-tomcat-6.0.20.tar.gz. Get the package, untar it and then refer to the installation docs to get Tomcat installed and running ((I might have some notes about Tomcat and running it and stuff, but the installation and configuration for it is beyond the scope of this post. Installing, configuring and troubleshooting tomcat is a topic for another day)) http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/setup.html.
Crap, it won't run! Oh yeah... I remember now, we need JRE for this not JDK... so we'll get that, http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp Now I remember what a PITA this thing is...
... I had to work on a couple of things, so the following notes may feel like they're separate... A couple days later...

I got java installed, and now Tomcat is running. ((Sorry kids, no notes for you on this one. Right now my notes on this are a scramble of post-its, google notebook, history and shell commands. I had to move fast because of the urgency on finishing this for a client. Wouldn't it be nice to have a script that just does all this for me? I initially had a system ready to go with all the stuff installed, the idea would be to just clone the system and customize it for the next time. Unfortunately I haven't had time to keep it up to date and at least 2 or 3 versions for the major software packages have been released so I couldn't honestly give them such an old installation.))

Get the applications you need ((This shows the standalone tars for the Atlassian apps, in fact I used the jar versions, you'll have to dig a little bit around for them, when I get some time I'll fix this to make it more clear))
wget http://www.atlassian.com/software/crowd/downloads/binary/atlassian-crowd-1.6.1.tar.gz
wget 
wget http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/downloads/binary/atlassian-jira-standard-3.13.4-standalone.tar.gz


No onto the Actual application installations. First up is MySQL server, these are just my history commands with a quick comment to explain.
yum -y install mysql mysql-server #Installs server from repository, not latest and greatest but stable and quick.
mysql -uroot     #Get on the mysql console to make sure it works
service mysqld start # I guess you gotta start it first huh?
chkconfig --level 3 mysqld on # Make sure it'll start after a reboot
mysql -uroot # Now get on and check things out.
vim /etc/my.cnf # Configure your options for mysqld.
service mysqld restart # Just for kicks.

I really like the command line but when it comes to managing MySQL, the MySQL Administrator kicks ass IMO. So I give myself local network permissions to remotely connect to the box with the Administrator and then I do the rest from the GUI ((Generally speaking, I prefer the command line, but lately some of the GUIs for several systems we use have proven to be as good and sometimes even better (yikes!) than the CLI. This one is debatable, if you're a MySQL guru and you know all the statements then stick to the CLI, but if you're fuzzy about commands and structure, or you like the visual representation then I highly recommend the MySQL Administrator as well as its companion the SQL Query Browser.))

To get network access to the system so you can use the MySQL Administrator, log into mysql with the root user, then do this:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'your.ip.address' identified by "password_of_your_choice";

Follow the instructions to create the usernames and databases for each application. Instructions are available for each one. Here is Crowd, Confluence & Jira. Note that the docs for Crowd are incomplete since they don't officially support TC 6, the commons/lib folder they call for, does not exist. You'll need to review this official doc, and maybe this post can shed some light as well: . In summary, the driver goes to $CATALINA_HOME/lib not $CATALINA_HOME/commons/lib. The MySQL driver I'm using is here:mysql java connector 5.0.8.
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# cp mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar $CATALINA_HOME/lib/
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# ls !$
ls $CATALINA_HOME/lib/
annotations-api.jar  catalina-ha.jar  catalina-tribes.jar  jasper-el.jar  jasper-jdt.jar  mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar  tomcat-coyote.jar  tomcat-i18n-es.jar  tomcat-i18n-ja.jar
catalina-ant.jar     catalina.jar     el-api.jar           jasper.jar     jsp-api.jar     servlet-api.jar                     tomcat-dbcp.jar    tomcat-i18n-fr.jar
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]#

I like to create all usernames and databases at once since there isn't much to it if you do them all at once. Each username should only have access to its own database, and only from localhost ((Unless of course you're installing a multi-node system where you might require access from other hosts, I don't)).

Next up is to add the shared jars, they go in the same place as the mysql driver; as stated in the Atlassian docs, you can get these files from the standalone package for Crowd, I simply copied them from another server where we already have this working, I put them at home then copy them out to their final spot.
[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# ls -lt ~
total 233444
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   388864 Jun 12 09:13 mail-1.4.jar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     8382 Jun 12 09:13 jta-1.0.1B.jar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     8809 Jun 12 09:13 jta-1.0.1.jar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   540852 Jun 12 08:48 mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar

[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# cp -u ~/*.jar $CATALINA_HOME/lib/

[root@xxxx_webapp_01 ~]# ls -lat $CATALINA_HOME/lib/
total 5864
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  388864 Jun 12  2009 mail-1.4.jar
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    4096 Jun 12  2009 .
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    8809 Jun 12  2009 jta-1.0.1.jar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    8382 Jun 12  2009 jta-1.0.1B.jar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   62983 Jun 12  2009 activation-1.1.jar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  540852 Jun 12 08:54 mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar

Lets finish preparing the directories to host all three apps, I use symlinks to maintain easy to read and maintain scripts. For example "jira" will point to the actual jira folder. That way if you upgrade Jira for example, you don't have to go and find all the scripts that have atlassian-jira-standard-3.13.4-standalone. You simply make the symlink jira point to the new folder, say atlassian-jira-standard-4.x.x.x-standalone. This is also great for testing.
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# pwd
/opt/atlassian

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ls -la
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 4096 Jun 12  2009 .
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root 4096 Jun 12 09:38 ..
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Feb 16 23:18 atlassian-crowd-1.6.1
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Jun 12  2009 atlassian-jira-standard-3.13.4-standalone
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Jun 12  2009 confluence-3.0.0_01-std

[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ln -s atlassian-crowd-1.6.1 crowd
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ln -s atlassian-jira-standard-3.13.4-standalone jira
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ln -s confluence-3.0.0_01-std confluence
[root@XXXX_webapp_01 atlassian]# ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Feb 16 23:18 atlassian-crowd-1.6.1
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Jun 12  2009 atlassian-jira-standard-3.13.4-standalone
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   23 Jun 12  2009 confluence -> confluence-3.0.0_01-std
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Jun 12  2009 confluence-3.0.0_01-std
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   21 Jun 12  2009 crowd -> atlassian-crowd-1.6.1
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   41 Jun 12  2009 jira -> atlassian-jira-standard-3.13.4-standalone

You'll need to add a "crowd.xml" file to the Tomcat deploy directory, I'm using the exploded war for crowd. You also need to configure the crowd properties file and specify the home for crowd, I made it to be /opt/atlassian/crowd-home. As much as I hate Tomcat, this is *all* you have to do to deploy Crowd onto Tomcat. After this is done then you still have to go through the Crowd wizard configuration.
[10:43 AM] xxxx_webapp_01:/opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/lib # cd /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost/
[10:43 AM] xxxx_webapp_01:/opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost # ls -la
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 10:29 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun  9 12:36 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   75 Jun 12 10:29 crowd.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  885 Jun  9 12:36 host-manager.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  885 Jun  9 12:36 manager.xml

this goes in it, just match your path

The wizard configuration is pretty straight forward, you'll configure the license which you can obtain from atlassian directly at the time of your configuration; you'll give them your server ID, and they'll in turn give you a license key to match. After the license you'll configure the database, using jdbc fill in the details

The next screen allows you to name the server, give it a timeout value and specify the base url for crowd. I left mine at default and just added the name of the server.

The next two screens deal with some more configuration options, like your mail relay and internal directory information along with some password parameters. Then you'll configure the administrator account, this is important note it all down or save it somewhere so you can get in to the server once it is ready to go. After a couple more screens then you should be ready to go.

Use your administrator username and password to login and you can see what the Crowd administrator console has to offer. After we install each of the applications, we'll have to come back here and configure them in Crowd to setup the Single Sign On procedures.

Put Crowd to rest for now and lets install Confluence on Tomcat.
The installation for Confluence is similar to Crowds. Explode the war, make a home for confluence, configure the confluence properties file, then add the context file (confluence to Tomcat.
XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/atlassian # mkdir /opt/atlassian/confluence-home

[12:09 PM] XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/atlassian/confluence/WEB-INF/classes # vim confluence-init.properties 
[12:09 PM] XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/atlassian/confluence/WEB-INF/classes # cat !$
cat confluence-init.properties
confluence.home=/opt/atlassian/confluence-home

[12:06 PM] XXXX_webapp_01: cd /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost
[12:06 PM] XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost # vim confluence.xml 
[12:06 PM] XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost # cat !$
cat confluence.xml


Then you should be able to restart Tomcat and have http://your-tomcatserver/confluence available. It may take a little while to start, it did for me and it freaked me out a little bit, especially when I got this error.

If you haven't created the database for confluence, you should do it before starting the Confluence Setup Wizard. The wizard will walk you through the configuration since we're using an external database, we'll need to do the Custom installation. Pick MySQL and then configure the username and password for the connection.

The database instructions for Confluence aren't as clear as the one for Crowd. I think they assume that you're migrating from a standalone installation to an external database installation. I mention this because I was concerned that the mysql connector also should be put into the confluence lib directory, not just in the $CATALINA_HOME/lib/ directory. So I just copied this file from the tomcat shared lib to the confluence lib. ((I did this even after I had started the Configuration Wizard and it just worked.))
[12:14 PM] XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost # cp /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar /opt/atlassian/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/
[12:38 PM] XXXX_webapp_01:/opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/conf/Catalina/localhost # ls -lt !$
ls -lt /opt/atlassian/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/
total 54952
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  540852 Jun 12  2009 mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar

The next few steps are self explanatory and should lead you to a successful installation of confluence, I picked the option to have sample data in place since the users for this instance of Confluence might not have ever used a wiki; this should help them figure it out easily. Hopefully you get this:

Now that Confluence is installed, lets integrate confluence into Crowd. I'll be following this document http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+Confluence
I will be using a single directory instead of the way the document suggests to have a directory per application. This is easier to manage IMO. ((I went back and made this modification after I took some screenshots, so some of the pictures may not match exactly what I'm saying))


With the directory, groups and at least one user configured, we're ready to add the Confluence application. Follow the steps to define the application as described in the documentation. Note the username and password fields aren't known at this time so you can define them now, you'll need to use these later in the properties file for crowd. Complete the steps to add the application. Grant the confluence-users and confluence-administrators to log into Confluence.

--- Other notes
I noticed that my instructions have a mistake, instead of using the crowd standalone, I actually used the crowd war file same for Confluence. You need to download the war versions of these instead of the standalone versions. Keep your eyes out for that info on the Atlassian docs for now until I get a chance to fix this.
The post Confluence and Crowd Installation notes. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
					
		
		
			
		
		
		https://notagrouch.com/difference-jdkbin-jdkrpmbin/
		
		
		Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:42:23 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=352

					When you're installing jdks for linux, you'll often find two different versions, one that is named something like this: jdk-6u14-linux-x64.bin and another one like thisjdk-6u14-linux-x64-rpm.bin. So what is the difference? One of them is a generic package suitable for most Linux installations that don't use RPMs. The other one, is, you guessed it, for RPM...

The post What’s the difference between jdk…bin and jdk…-rpm.bin? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
										When you're installing jdks for linux, you'll often find two different versions, one that is named something like this: jdk-6u14-linux-x64.bin and another one like thisjdk-6u14-linux-x64-rpm.bin.

So what is the difference? One of them is a generic package suitable for most Linux installations that don't use RPMs. The other one, is, you guessed it, for RPM based systems.

Both of them need to be made excutable by running the chmod +x filename command.
If you use the jdk-6u14-linux....bin file, then you'll be presented the agreement and then all the files will be unpacked where you ran the command. After this is done, you must set your JAVA_HOME, and other variables you might need. In addition to these nuisances, the system usually doesn't know about JAVA, things like which, rpm -qa, and info, don't really work.
When working on an RPM based system (CentOS, Fedora, RedHat, Rocks, Scientific), you should try using the RPM based install.

The post What’s the difference between jdk…bin and jdk…-rpm.bin? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
]]>
					
		
		
			
		
		
		https://notagrouch.com/kickstart-failed-because-realtek-driver-issue/
		
		
		Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:44:12 +0000
				
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=208

					In a previous post I mentioned that I was having problems kickstarting one of the appliances. Nothing can be more perplexing than something that was working fine, and then it stops working for no apparent reason! This must have been a driver issue; I either migrated the old kickstart environment incorrectly, or something in the...

The post Turned out to be a driver issue appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										In a previous post I mentioned that I was having problems kickstarting one of the appliances. Nothing can be more perplexing than something that was working fine, and then it stops working for no apparent reason! This must have been a driver issue; I either migrated the old kickstart environment incorrectly, or something in the hardware specs had changed and caused the kickstart to fail.

I found an error on the console during the installation (press alt+F2) that explained the problem, Kickstart could not find or load a network driver so it kicked out to a regular installation prompting me for a source for the install.
I tracked another older unit similar to this one and confirmed that the hardware had indeed changed, we had changed the motherboard, which comes with a different network device; we never got around to updating the drivers. So I had to build a new driver, in the same manner that my buddy Steve built a driver for this very same situation.
This applies to these Realtek Network cards: RTL8111B, RTL8168B, RTL8111, RTL8168, RTL8111C, RTL8111CP, RTL8111D(L), RTL8168C, RTL8111DP. I need a driver for this kernel:  2.6.9-42, running on CentOS 4.4

I got the drivers here: (http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false)
Then I got another appliance ready ((You really could use any Linux environment you have available, but I think its easier to have the same kernel running on the system when you compile it.)) and installed some of the necessary utilities to compile a new driver; gcc, make and anything else Yum got. Later on I found I needed the kernel-devel package as well.
I got the driver archive directly with wget by getting the URL from Download them all in Firefox ((Neat trick if you get those pesky javascript void redirects, and you can't get the url.)) to avoid getting the driver then uploading it to the appliance.


From here, follow through the read me that is in the file and I should end up with the driver that I need.
I got this error on the first command that the readme tells me to run.
/lib/modules/2.6.9-42.EL/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.
I had to install the kernel-devel package for that kernel version, don't use Yum because it will get the latest and it will not necessarily get the right one, your best option is to just install it from the original source ((We have an internal webserver with all the sources. Notice the 10.10.18.10 address corresponds to this internal server, you'll have to find your own if you're working through this. You can also use the rpms from the disk or wherever else you have them)) with:
rpm -ivh http://your-source-url/centos/x86/4.4/CentOS/RPMS/kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL.i686.rpm
Then I was able to build and continue with the instructions in the readme file.
Terminal log:

---------------------

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# rpm -ql kernel-devel| grep modules

/lib/modules/2.6.9-78.0.22.EL/build

/lib/modules/2.6.9-78.0.22.EL/source

/usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-78.0.22.EL-i686/include/config/modules.h

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# uname -a

Linux appliance 2.6.9-42.EL #1 Sat Aug 12 09:17:58 CDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# yum -y remove kernel-devel

Setting up Remove Process

Resolving Dependencies

--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.

---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.9-78.0.22.EL set to be erased

--> Running transaction check
Dependencies Resolved
=============================================================================

Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size

=============================================================================

Removing:

kernel-devel            i686       2.6.9-78.0.22.EL  installed          12 M
Transaction Summary

=============================================================================

Install      0 Package(s)

Update       0 Package(s)

Remove       1 Package(s)

Total download size: 0

Downloading Packages:

Running Transaction Test

Finished Transaction Test

Transaction Test Succeeded

Running Transaction

Removing  : kernel-devel                 ######################### [1/1]
Removed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.9-78.0.22.EL

Complete!

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# uname -a

Linux appliance 2.6.9-42.EL #1 Sat Aug 12 09:17:58 CDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# rpm -Ivh

-Ivh: unknown option

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# rpm -ivh

Retrieving

Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
1:kernel-devel           ######################################### [100%]
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# make clean modulesmake -C src/ clean

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

rm -rf *.o *.ko *~ core* .dep* .*.d .*.cmd *.mod.c *.a *.s .*.flags .tmp_versions Module.symvers Modules.symvers Module.markers *.################################################################################

order

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C src/ modules

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C /lib/modules/2.6.9-42.EL/build SUBDIRS=/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src modules

make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-42.EL-i686'

CC [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.o

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:174: warning: `MODULE_PARM_' is deprecated (declared at include/linux/module.h:552)

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:175: warning: `MODULE_PARM_' is deprecated (declared at include/linux/module.h:552)

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:176: warning: `MODULE_PARM_' is deprecated (declared at include/linux/module.h:552)

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c: In function `rtl8168_tx_clear':

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:5005: warning: unused variable `dev'

CC [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_asf.o

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_asf.c: In function `rtl8168_asf_time_period':

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_asf.c:313: warning: 'pos' might be used uninitialized in this function

LD [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168.o

Building modules, stage 2.

MODPOST

CC      /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168.mod.o

LD [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168.ko

make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-42.EL-i686'

strip --strip-debug r8168.ko

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# make install

make -C src/ install

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

install -m 744 -c r8168.ko /lib/modules/2.6.9-42.EL/kernel/drivers/net/

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# ls src/

Makefile           r8168_asf.c  r8168_asf.o  r8168.ko     r8168.mod.o  r8168_n.o

Makefile_linux24x  r8168_asf.h  r8168.h      r8168.mod.c  r8168_n.c    r8168.o

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# mv src/r8168.ko  r8168.ko.2.6.9-42.EL

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# make clean

make -C src/ clean

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

rm -rf *.o *.ko *~ core* .dep* .*.d .*.cmd *.mod.c *.a *.s .*.flags .tmp_versions Module.symvers Modules.symvers Module.markers *.order

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# cp src/Makefile src/Makefile.orig
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# vi src/Makefile

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# make

make -C src/ clean

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

rm -rf *.o *.ko *~ core* .dep* .*.d .*.cmd *.mod.c *.a *.s .*.flags .tmp_versions Module.symvers Modules.symvers Module.markers *.order

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C src/ modules

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C /lib/modules/2.6.9-42.ELsmp/build SUBDIRS=/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src modules

make: *** /lib/modules/2.6.9-42.ELsmp/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.

make: Entering an unknown directorymake: Leaving an unknown directorymake[1]: *** [modules] Error 2

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make: *** [modules] Error 2

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# rpm -ivh

Retrieving

Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]

1:kernel-smp-devel       ###################################### [100%]
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]#

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# makemake -C src/ clean

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

rm -rf *.o *.ko *~ core* .dep* .*.d .*.cmd *.mod.c *.a *.s .*.flags .tmp_versions Module.symvers Modules.symvers Module.markers *.order

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C src/ modules

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C /lib/modules/2.6.9-42.ELsmp/build SUBDIRS=/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src modules

make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-42.EL-smp-i686'

CC [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.o

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:174: warning: `MODULE_PARM_' is deprecated (declared at include/linux/module.h:552)

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:175: warning: `MODULE_PARM_' is deprecated (declared at include/linux/module.h:552)

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:176: warning: `MODULE_PARM_' is deprecated (declared at include/linux/module.h:552)

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c: In function `rtl8168_tx_clear':

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_n.c:5005: warning: unused variable `dev'

CC [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_asf.o

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_asf.c: In function `rtl8168_asf_time_period':

/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168_asf.c:313: warning: 'pos' might be used uninitialized in this function

LD [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168.o

Building modules, stage 2.

MODPOST

CC      /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168.mod.o

LD [M]  /root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src/r8168.ko

make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-42.EL-smp-i686'

strip --strip-debug r8168.ko

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

make -C src/ install

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

install -m 744 -c r8168.ko /lib/modules/2.6.9-42.ELsmp/kernel/drivers/net/

make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/tmpdriver/r8168-8.012.00/src'

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# ls src/

Makefile           Makefile.orig  r8168_asf.h  r8168.h   r8168.mod.c  r8168_n.c  r8168.o

Makefile_linux24x  r8168_asf.c    r8168_asf.o  r8168.ko  r8168.mod.o  r8168_n.o
[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# mv src/r8168.ko r8168.ko.2.6.9-42.ELsmp

[root@appliance r8168-8.012.00]# ls -l

total 172

-rw-r--r--  1 root root  1789 Mar 25 08:07 Makefile

-rw-r--r--  1 root root 65068 Jun  2 17:57 r8168.ko.2.6.9-42.EL

-rw-r--r--  1 root root 64168 Jun  2 18:06 r8168.ko.2.6.9-42.ELsmp

-rw-r--r--  1 root root  4425 Jan  6 10:33 readme

drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  4096 Jun  2 18:08 src

------------
Now onto inserting this to our initrd image... or do we need a driver disk? Steve's article calls to update the initrd image, but I wasn't sure which initrd file I would have to update, in my case, my Kickstart file calls for a driver disk which contains the driver for another network card that we had to build. I think this is where it would go. I'm a little confused on my own train of thought so scratch that last part off, the only thing I need to remember is that I had to modify the initrd.img file that resides on the tftpboot directory.
As it is outlined in the article, the driverdisk works for any driver that isn't a network driver; the reason this doesn't work for network drivers is that Anaconda needs the driver loaded so it can get networking services to get the kickstart file and that stuff started, thus you need to load it before Anaconda kicks in. This is what makes it required to be part of the initrd image. I found a slight discrepancy that made me nervous and caused me to retrace all my steps; it was that the arcticle calls you to copy both of the drivers built; smp and non-smp into their respective directories under the loop-mounted image but this doesn't seem to work because the initrd.img file doesn't have the ELsmp directory there.  I skipped this part, hoping that the kickstart would just work and then I can simply copy in the right drivers on the post-install and be done with this. When I talked to Steve about it it seems that this was just an editorial mistake and you don't in fact need to do both drivers for the kickstart, In this case which is technically the same project we don't need the ELsmp working at kickstart time. YMMV on this one.
After I repackaged the initrd.img file and replaced it on the /tftpboot directory then I was able to continue on with the kickstart installation. I ran into the problem that Ruiz mentioned, despite the fact that I had the driver set to be added to the system during the kickstart. 
So now you can replace your initrd.img with the one you just created. The kickstart should work fine now, but upon reboot, the system will not be able to find the right driver. After the kickstart, you need to copy over the .ko files to the appropriate directories - we added a line in our post-install script to do this for us, it simply copies the .ko file to the appropriate directory (/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/)
I think the failure was in the way in which I added the driver in. We have a post-install script that basically "tars" a bunch of files into the newly built system. In this system, for example if you put a file in the ../files/var/ directory, then that file will live in the new system under /var, ../files/root then would be /root; do I make sense? Well I put the drivers into ../files/lib/modules/...../net/ for both EL and ELsmp. After the system was kickstarted, I found that the r8168.ko files were in place, but the drivers didn't actually load. Why?
After I did insmod r8168.ko and restarted network services then the driver worked great. So how do I get that to happen automatically? It seems that maybe I'll need to update the driverdisk.img as well as the initrd.img. Sheesh, a full day worth of work plus then some just for a driver update. If it helps anybody, I'll have this available up here as soon as I am finished with it so you don't have to go through the trouble of making it yourself. What a pain! I'll have to continue this on the next post when I get back on this task tomorrow.
To finish:

- automatically load the driver on the right appliance. How to do this?

- Does it matter if you run insmod /lib/modules/*/* or something like that? What happens if you just load insmod at first boot? or during our appliance configuration final script?
The post Turned out to be a driver issue appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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		https://notagrouch.com/appliance-cloning-saga-continues/
		
		
		Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:41:53 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=194

					We finally have laid down the roadmap to appliance building Nirvana. We met yesterday and last week with our manufacturers to discuss the technicalities of the process and the logistics to wrap it all up. We now have the following in place: Network Boot system that allows us to: Boot into our Kickstart environment. Boot...

The post Appliance cloning saga continues appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										We finally have laid down the roadmap to appliance building Nirvana. We met yesterday and last week with our manufacturers to discuss the technicalities of the process and the logistics to wrap it all up.

We now have the following in place:

 Network Boot system that allows us to:

Boot into our Kickstart environment.
Boot into Clonezilla to clone or restore images.
Boot into anything we want. ((This is freakin awesome, Knoppix, Windows Installation, or the latest and greatest Linux distro, just plug into our PXE boot system with menu.c32 and we're set to go. I know, I know, easier said than done, but we do have at least 3 network-bootable OS choices now, more will be added soon.))


The process to make an image and pass it on to our manufacturers.

They will keep an inventory of machines ready to go with our latest image.
When an order comes in, we notify them and they process it and ship directly.


Just prior to shipping, the operator runs a script that takes care of a few things:

Regenerates unique identifier keys and similar stuff, like SSH keys, certificates and other similar objects.
Generates, applies and securely tells us the credentials needed for the system.
Gets its Serial Number and other device specific information and calls home with that information so we can register the machine appropriately.


The confidence that they will prepare our orders to spec and ship directly.

If you've ever had to do something similar, I'm sure you understand what this means, now we can spend time in improving the performance and features of the appliance instead of having to build them each time we get new orders. We have freed up dozens of man hours for each machine that is purchased. That is the real value of this project. We are near its completion, I'd say we're about 98% there.
We tested three out of the four models that we have, and I have one more to work on that seems to be a little problematic in regards to its network card and the kickstart process. It makes me wonder if something broke recently or if we haven't sold very many units of this type. The testing included cloning an appliance, uploading to an ftp site ((This step was really superfluous but we're also working on fully automating the transmission of a new image to the manufacturer and the only way to give them a new image is via FTP so we had to include this in our testing.))  then restoring the image and running our preparation scripts. This makes the appliance ready to ship.
Now the only part that we have to test is the actual process with one or two machines. Our manufacturer has now agreed to run two or three appliances through an order fullfilment process test run which will highlight any deficiencies, improvements or changes we should or could make to our design. They will actually be shipping to us and we'll be the customer for these models.
Some additional benefits to having this type of work outsourced is the convenience of post-ship support. The manufacturer takes care of any warranty issues that require a replacement machine or a repair; failed Hard drives, flaky network card, . We chose to have the customer support part of it handled by our Help Desk as we've had it in the past ((We think we should provide excellent Customer Support so we like to have full control over that, we know our customers and our Help Desk is good at what they do)), but we'll pass on new RMAs directly to the manufacturer and they will handle the shipping and returns automatically. This is another huge time and money saver; you see, all of these services are basically included with most of our purchases, we just never had a chance to take advantage of them. When you are a manufacturer specialized in a niche market then usually you can offer a lot of value to your customers by bundling features that are already built into your infrastructure. I still wish that they would have accommodated our original request to host a mirror kickstart environment at their facility, but I understand why --in this case-- it was better to go with the flow and stick to their process instead of making them follow ours.
The post Appliance cloning saga continues appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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		https://notagrouch.com/enterprise-backup-project/
		
		
		Wed, 27 May 2009 16:24:17 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=164

					Backup, backup, backup. The mantra of a good Systems Administrator. There is something really scary that will keep you up at night when you are in charge of an enterprise network and you aren't sure about your recovery strategy. One of the clients I work with is in a tight budget so naturally backup, to...

The post Enterprise Backup Project appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										Backup, backup, backup. The mantra of a good Systems Administrator. There is something really scary that will keep you up at night when you are in charge of an enterprise network and you aren't sure about your recovery strategy. One of the clients I work with is in a tight budget so naturally backup, to them, backup was an after-thought.

My task: to establish a full backup system, without spending a dime. Spending my time on this is okay since they have a budget for labor, just not software. I had to turn to the friendly OpenSource community. A bunch of names came up, and most of them are well known in the FOSS realm and some even have a foot or two in the door at the enterprise.
I have to decide whether to use Amanda or Bacula. Both seem very promising and challenging at the same time, each one with its own quirks. I tend to lean towards Amanda because it seems more robust and easier to manage --not that it will actually be easy.
I have a mixed environment of Networking devices, Windows Servers, VM Hypervisors and Linux servers. This should be fun.
The post Enterprise Backup Project appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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		https://notagrouch.com/using-google-video-first-time/
		
		
		Sat, 16 May 2009 02:41:08 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=93

					I was recently tasked with making sure videos work properly on our website. After some tweaking and debugging, I found that the videos work great. We're using a plugin to let us use a very simple notation to add a video. The plugin is by Joshua Eldridge and it uses Jeron Wijering's FLV Media Player....

The post Google Video appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										I was recently tasked with making sure videos work properly on our website. After some tweaking and debugging, I found that the videos work great. We're using a plugin to let us use a very simple notation to add a video. The plugin is by Joshua Eldridge and it uses Jeron Wijering's FLV Media Player. One problem you might encounter is that maybe your videos are too big, too long or you maybe don't have the bandwidth to host them.

We had to figure out a way to load the video faster and make sure it remains always available even under heavy server load, so I turned to Google Video. We already use Google for business for our mail, calendar, docs and other services so I thought, why not try it out. Uploading was very easy, just as you would expect. I've uploaded videos to YouTube before and this was very similar. I guess the difference might be that this video won't show up under YouTube. The video is over 85 minutes long so it is taking a while to process. I'll update this soon.
Update: It took about a full day to process this whole video and then it was available. Unfortunately it cannot be made available to the public. I'm not sure why, especially under a paid Google business account. Wouldn't you expect this to be an option just like it is to publicly share your calendar, documents and pages and other services that come bundled with the Google apps. So scrap the idea that you can use your Google Apps account to host videos for your website. We ended up using it for internal users only for now. 
The post Google Video appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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		https://notagrouch.com/pxe-network-boot-server-update/
		
		
		Thu, 14 May 2009 15:51:54 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=79

					I'm very excited about the progress on my network boot server. I got it working yesterday, and it is pretty sweet so far. I've had tons of help from a few people and a number of online resources. Steve K. and his knowledge of Unix, TCP, and Linux' obscure intricacies combined with years of experience...

The post PXE Network Boot Server update appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										I'm very excited about the progress on my network boot server. I got it working yesterday, and it is pretty sweet so far. I've had tons of help from a few people and a number of online resources. Steve K. and his knowledge of Unix, TCP,  and Linux' obscure intricacies combined with years of experience have saved me litterally dozens of hours in research time. By the powers that be, magic pixie dust, and some mad skills from David I can go from Vlan 3, where my computer has an IP address of 10.10.3.X to this new Vlan where computers and my dhcp server get 10.10.18.X addresses, Thank you! And last but not least my other friend Steve has also helped quite a bit with storage, virtualization and a bunch of other bits and pieces. Thank you guys.


This is what I can do already:

Offer DHCP (for Vlan 18), TFTP, NFS & HTTP services on the new server, DNS is handled by the main network.
Boot a pxe-bootble system to a custom menu which gives you a number of options:

Install our standard Appliance build
Clone or Restore the machine
Install CentOS 5.2 x86_64


This is what I need to be able to do when I consider this complete:

Boot the latest Knoppix distro.
 Install a few Windows OS: 2003 Server, 2000 Server, XP Pro SP2, maybe even Vista. They should finish Automagically, have the right drivers, have additional software like AV, and other utilities, and be updated and patched.
Install Oracle VM manager from PXE.
Install VMware Hypervisor from PXE
Automatically Clone/Restore a machine completely. Turn it on, select auto-clone/restore and walk away, come back when the machine is finished.

And amongst a bunch of other ideas, these other items would be nice:

Boot a computer into a computing cluster. Something like Enomaly comes to mind. Just because we can.
Set up a Master server that allows clients to boot to it, like the K12LTS.


The post PXE Network Boot Server update appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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		https://notagrouch.com/sweet-major-progress-on-cloning-appliances/
		
		
		Wed, 13 May 2009 16:29:54 +0000
				
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=77

					I got a netboot system working yesterday. able to boot appliances into a Centos 5.2 installation. I'm now working on migrating our old kickstart stuff into this new system and try it out. In the process I've discovered that we're using CentOS 4.4 as the base for this appliance build. Centos 4.4 was a little...

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										I got a netboot system working yesterday. able to boot appliances into a Centos 5.2 installation. I'm now working on migrating our old kickstart stuff into this new system and try it out. 

In the process I've discovered that we're using CentOS 4.4 as the base for this appliance build. Centos 4.4 was a little tricky to find, everyone redirects you to the latest 4.X which is 4.7, and most mirrors don't provide anything below 4.6. I found them at the Vault just in case you need them too.
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		https://notagrouch.com/appliance-cloning-project-update/
		
		
		Fri, 08 May 2009 19:09:40 +0000
				
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=39

					The whole writing the Serial Number to the BIOS did not go as planned and I had to put it to rest yesterday. I think its worth re-visiting as a personal project because its just pretty damn cool to be able to write anything ((By this I mean, anything reasonable, like a pc. Don't take...

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										The whole writing the Serial Number to the BIOS did not go as planned and I had to put it to rest yesterday. I think its worth re-visiting as a personal project because its just pretty damn cool to be able to write anything ((By this I mean, anything reasonable, like a pc. Don't take it literally, I don't expect for example to be able to boot an ancient pc 8+ years old.)) you want in there. All dmidecode does is tell you what is in the BIOS, it doesn't check it, it doesn't cross reference another database to verify that the information from the BIOS is indeed accurate. You could use information in there to deploy different software based on certain hardware components, you can use it to find out when BIOS needs updating, you can use it in a lot of ways. Imagine now if you had control of what goes onto that? Pretty cool stuff can happen with it so hopefully I can come back to it soon. You could for example, create one restore disc for your mobile workforce that automatically detects the type of hardware its installing on and you can apply patches, custom scripts, custom applications, based on the dmidecode output.

Now, for the task at hand. Cloning requires that we use a cloning utility, imaging software, or a manual process to do this.

The options in no particular order:

ClonezillaSuggested by the manufacturer along with G4L
Symantec Ghost tools Probably the biggest name on this arena, but its not free.
G4L Also recommended by the manufacturer. Always glad to support an app like this and they seem to have it at a pretty stable place.
G4U Yikes, just looking at the documentation scared me away. Next...
PINGFirst time I heard of this is when I had to take a stab at this project. Seems promising and would love to try it but for expediency and to avoid yet another learning curve, I'm skipping this one.
Acronis True Image tools I dismissed it when it took me over 4 minutes to find anything related to what I was looking for on their website. I know its there but I really don't care to browse through that site. And I've never heard great reviews about their products either.

In addition to the applications listed above, there are other options that I just didn't mention, along with other processes I've used in the past under special circumstances. For example, you could use a combination of Knoppix, and dd, or ddrescue. Even taking the drive out and using a harddrive cloner could be an option, but this project needs a few things that will prevent us from using manual processes. There are three big requirements to this project:

Be automated as much as possible
Support multiple hardware combinations with 1 image
Easy and quick to edit and modify

I think that I will use Clonezilla, it seems promising and very flexible. There are options to run a master clone server. I can run it from CD, USB or from the network and this is very appealing.
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		https://notagrouch.com/who-ever-knew-that-ping-started-a-one-night-hack/
		
		
		Fri, 01 May 2009 20:41:13 +0000
				
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=46

					I read about this today, I stumbled on it and I thought it was worth sharing. Especially the bit where he tells us about the best ping story he's ever heard... It's actually a pretty clever way of using it and method I would gladly use in this situation. I could have used this a...

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										I read about this today, I stumbled on it and I thought it was worth sharing. Especially the bit where he tells us about the best ping story he's ever heard... It's actually a pretty clever way of using it and method I would gladly use in this situation. I could have used this a few months ago.

The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:
ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure.... the full whole thing is right here  The Story of the PING Program
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		https://notagrouch.com/outsource-appliance-build-day-2-dirty-notes/
		
		
		Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:49:07 +0000
				
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=23

					Today is day 2 of this project and it seems to grow bigger each minute. The complexity of it is a little bit overwhelming so hopefully I can keep my sanity, keep my job and keep the other tasks and projects I'm working on afloat. None of my attempts to get an alternate boot menu...

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										Today is day 2 of this project and it seems to grow bigger each minute. The complexity of it is a little bit overwhelming so hopefully I can keep my sanity, keep my job and keep the other tasks and projects I'm working on afloat.

None of my attempts to get an alternate boot menu for pxe-boot worked. I tried over a dozen combinations of menu systems using menu.c32. I have a couple more hours today to work on this then I need to move onto the scripting part. You see, the main part of this project is outsourcing the production of appliances. I wanted to test the ability to put any serial number in the BIOS so I could query it and do the script magic. This would reassure me that the BIOS accepts our Serial Number format, and I can actually look for it in my script. If this proves to be as difficult today as it did yesterday then I will skip it and move onto the script magic. Ultimately the manufacturer will be entering the SN into the BIOS themselves so I really don't need to worry about it too much, but I did want to test with the actual information that will be in there. Oh well, a few more stabs at it and if I get no results, I'm moving on.
For now, the Serial Number is blank so I'll have to use another similar field to do my testing. Then I'll switch this at the last minute for some final QA and hopefully call it a day.
Machines I'm working with.

DHCP server. This was in place already and I rather not build out another one just for this, afterall we want to keep using this. Uname -a reports this: SunOS dchpserver 5.9 Generic_122300-04 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2
Kickstart server. Also already in place, in conjunction with the DHCP server, this kicks ass. I'm almost affraid to muck with it. Uname -a reports this: Linux kickstartserver 2.6.9-42.EL #1 Sat Aug 12 09:17:58 CDT 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
My iMac and MBP. My main tools, iMac is my primary workstation, but in ocassion I need to go to the Network room, or our build lab,  and I bring my MacBook Pro to do work in there. I can use these two systems almost interchangably but I like my iMac's dual screen setup.
3 appliances total (one representing each major model). I'm initially doing the work on just one, the entry level model. This is the "weakest" of the 3 and could have the most restrictions on what I can do. I'm using this as sort of "lowest common denominator" The other 2 appliances should have all the features this one has plus extras.
Generic Linux Box. Used this system to compile, decompile, ftp, ssh, wgets, making images, isos etc. Always handy to have a linux scratchbox on hand. This is a Fedora 10 box running virtual on our Oracle VM manager. Plus I hate the Sun stuff on the DHCP server, lots of missing utilities like vim, or wget, even rsync,  and all of the stuff that is done the "sun-way" just kinda drives me nuts. I prefer GNU stuff.

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		https://notagrouch.com/outsourcing-your-appliance-buildout/
		
		
		Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:06:35 +0000
				
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=9

					The first post of a series that describes a very cool project. It describes my thought process, the evolution of an existing method and the engineering of a new process. I walk you through initial design, challenges, brainstorming, testing, implementation and final delivery. The ultimate goal? to outsource the manufacturing of appliances to the appliance manufacturer, including the software and OS implementation.

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										XYZ Inc. has been in the appliance business for sometime now. They are they choice appliance builder for many companies out there including my employer.

We've been doing our own custom build process to get our appliances out the door and so far its worked out okay. XYZ Inc. makes our appliances to spec and then ships it to us for us to configure the software in them. This is okay and works well but it isn't scalable. We wanted to be able to handle larger orders, in the range of 30 - 100 or more appliances per order.
The beginning.
Things to consider when going into this project:
Options available
Methods available to have XYZ Inc. do the machines.
Practicality vs Convenience.
We have one way that we want to do this, and the builder has their own different process. We're an engineering company and we can devise a million different ways to get this done but the important part here is to strike a good balance between practicality and functionality to accomplish the goal. XYZ wants us to follow their methods.
Order fulfillment
Who does what? Who tells the customer? who puts the customer in our database? The appliances have support contracts, who puts those into OUR system?
XYZ has a process and they're not about to change their method of fulfilling orders just because a little guy like us wants to do it differently. I get that. So our idea of doing a custom Kickstart server at their location, as a separate almost isolated network didn't fly too well with them. In a very polite way they said, no, you gotta do it our way.
Their way is simple and straight forward but it requires a lot of manual intervention, so this is the article to document that and how this experience went. Hope you enjoy it.
Planning...
Tasks:

Modify Kickstart.
Modify pre and post scripts to acommodate new process.

suck in the SN from the bios
suck in the model from the bios
fill in config information in appliance config files automatically.
Call home and tell us what the SN and model is. Dump the appliance into a state of "inventory"
Create an image that fits all models of the appliances.




Upload an image to XYZ. They use FTP, plain and simple. (great isn't it nice to know that your 20GB file is getting uploaded in plain text mode). Yay, gotta love legacy stuff that seems to linger like a roach.

Current Status:
Build out each appliance with the latest software based on orders. Must have inventory on hand and be nimble enough to fulfill orders as they come in. Appliances build themselves out semi-automatically via PXE boot.
Pros.

Latest software available and ready to go.
Quick, 3-15 minutes and an appliance is ready to go.

Cons.

One at a time.
Could be inconsistent.
Depends on having available inventory.

Initial Approach
dmidecode gives me a lot of information. Including a serial number field. The question is this... should we have our post-kickstart script ask the operator to input the SN, then we put it into the BIOS, and our configs. OR should we expect the manufacturer to have populated the SN into the BIOS and we just query it? I think the answer is simple, if we can write to the BIOS then lets do it. The operator has to be at the machine anyway so he might as well put that in at the time of processing the unit.
I think we're going to have to expect the Serial Number to be in place already.
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		https://notagrouch.com/install-postgresql-osx/
		
		
		Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:07:13 +0000
				
		http://www.muychingon.com/?p=671

					I needed to run some queries against a couple of postgress databases, and I didn't want to have to use a server. There's a quick and easy way to get pgsql installed and running on your mac.

The post How to Install Postgres on your Mac appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										Hopefully you've got mac ports installed already, if not head over there and install it.

After you have that installed, you can simply do:
$: sudo port install postgresql83
or do this:
$: sudo port search postgres
to get a list of what other versions and options you have available. I needed this to be able to run commands using pgsql directly from my main work system. Different options would be required if you want to run the server part of it.
This is what my install output looked like:
$: sudo port install postgresql83

--->  Fetching bison

--->  Attempting to fetch bison-2.3.tar.bz2 from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison

--->  Verifying checksum(s) for bison

--->  Extracting bison

--->  Configuring bison

--->  Building bison with target all

--->  Staging bison into destroot

--->  Installing bison 2.3_2

--->  Activating bison 2.3_2

--->  Cleaning bison

--->  Fetching ossp-uuid

--->  Attempting to fetch uuid-1.6.0.tar.gz from ftp://ftp.ossp.org/pkg/lib/uuid/

--->  Verifying checksum(s) for ossp-uuid

--->  Extracting ossp-uuid

--->  Applying patches to ossp-uuid

--->  Configuring ossp-uuid

--->  Building ossp-uuid with target all

--->  Staging ossp-uuid into destroot

--->  Installing ossp-uuid 1.6.0_2

--->  Activating ossp-uuid 1.6.0_2

--->  Cleaning ossp-uuid

--->  Fetching postgresql83

--->  Attempting to fetch postgresql-8.3.1.tar.bz2 from

--->  Attempting to fetch postgresql-8.3.1.tar.bz2 from

--->  Verifying checksum(s) for postgresql83

--->  Extracting postgresql83

--->  Configuring postgresql83

--->  Building postgresql83

--->  Staging postgresql83 into destroot

--->  Installing postgresql83 8.3.1_0

To use the postgresql server, install the postgresql83-server port

--->  Activating postgresql83 8.3.1_0

--->  Cleaning postgresql83

Then after this, I could issue this to get on the db and start running my queries:
$: /opt/local/bin/psql83 -U username -W -d databasename -h host-ip-address
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		https://notagrouch.com/remote-desktop-is-not-secure-myth/
		
		
		Sun, 13 May 2007 03:32:58 +0000
				
		
		http://notagrouch.com/?p=2789

					So I've been wrong for a while now about something. I always bought into the common assumption that Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is insecure. It actually is relatively secure. It is secure enough to keep your connections to Windows based computers safe from prying eyes and other threats. Waddaya know? Apparently for me, the answer...

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										So I've been wrong for a while now about something. I always bought into the common assumption that Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is insecure. It actually is relatively secure. It is secure enough to keep your connections to Windows based computers safe from prying eyes and other threats. Waddaya know? Apparently for me, the answer is "nothing" eh.

Anyway. While I was doing some research into the matter I found several comments by Microsoft fan-boys that RDP was good enough to use. Forums in the tech community were filled with these comments. So I had to find out more about this and I did. I found several articles that support these comments.
One of the features of RDP is the use of RC4 encryption. The same type of encryption sometimes used for SSL, Kerberos and a few other technologies. Of course, you should always make sure that both computers you are working with on this have the latest and greatest RDP client, and you must follow other standard security procedures like using safe passwords.
There's a slight chance that someone may setup a "man-in-the-middle" attack and try to decrypt your information. But Seriously? you think someone actually wants to go through the hassle of setting up this attack? Its expensive, time consuming, and usually reserved for multimillion dollar corporations or millionaires. Kurt, one of the bloogers I found talking about RDP put it best:
To give you an idea of the sophistication we're talking about, this hacking technique is usually reserved for attacking eCommerce sites like eBay & financial institutions like Bank of America to intercept credit cards & passwords. If someone is in fact truly attempting to use this technique against you and your computer, it's not random: You or your organization is probably important enough (or rich enough) that skimping paying $50/year for LogMeIn Pro, $200/year for GoToMyPC, or whatever support service you might otherwise be using isn't exactly your first priority. Remember: This is your Mom we're talking about... not freakin' Bill Gates.
I know that security through obscurity can be a fools errand, but you could try changing the port RDP runs on so you can prevent any automatic scripted attacks, or use some sort of port translation on your firewall --if you're connecting to a compuer across the internet. With that said, go forth and RDP into your home computer till you get sick of it. As far as the concerns for security with RDP, I think It's ok to use it.
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		https://notagrouch.com/the-firefox-addon-reviews-autocopy/
					https://notagrouch.com/the-firefox-addon-reviews-autocopy/#respond
		
		
		
				
		http://www.muychingon.com/2007/03/30/the-firefox-addon-reviews-autocopy/

					Good morning! I'm glad that you're back for the weekly Firefox add on review. If you missed some of the previous ones, check out the Firefox link on the right. Today I'll show you about Autocopy. It is a very simple extension and if you're not familiar with this concept, the first and only question...

The post The Firefox Addon Reviews – Autocopy appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										Good morning!

I'm glad that you're back for the weekly Firefox  add on review.  If you missed some of the previous ones, check out the Firefox link on the right.
Today I'll show you about Autocopy. It is a very simple extension and if you're not familiar with this concept, the first and only question you may ask is "Why?".  Why do you want this? Why should you use this? Well I think it is a great time saver. I use it almost every time I surf the web.
The concept is simple and it has been used by Linux and some windows programs like Putty for a long time. It is based on the notion that when you highlight a section of text, usually you intend to copy it. Instead of highlighting the text, then pressing "ctrl+c" and then "ctrl+v" to copy then paste, well... it autocopies the text you just highlighted in one motion.
Then to paste, you can use the middle-wheel from your mouse or simply press "ctrl+v" or use the edit menu and select paste. You can autocopy from the browser and it works in text boxes as well as regular pages. Whatever you copy goes into your clipboard so it is available to paste into any application, like Word or Excel. When you highlight the text, it will blink to indicate that it has been copied. As simple and trivial as this may seem, once you get the hang of it I'm pretty sure it will prove to be a huge help in your daily web surfing.
Autocopy works right out of the box and it indicates its status by placing a small clipboard with a check mark on it on the bottom right corner of your browser. You can temporarily disable the extension in one click by left-clicking on this icon.  If you right-click on the icon instead, you have  access to configuration options.
There's a lot of configuration options available if you want to get into it and customize it to your liking. I find that it works great with the defaults. The only thing I usually change is  the "De select after copy" option. That is just a preference I have.
If you want to give it a try, you can download it from here.
Have a great weekend!
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					https://notagrouch.com/the-firefox-addon-reviews-autocopy/feed/
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		https://notagrouch.com/use-strong-passwords-and-keep-them-safe-with-keepass/
		
		
		Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:39:54 +0000
				
		
		http://www.muychingon.com/2007/03/20/use-strong-passwords-and-keep-them-safe-with-keepass/

					As all three of my regular visitors know, a few months back my server was hacked. It was pretty bad, to the point where I lost a couple of years of blog posts and other information I had on my server. This event prompted me to start walking the walk that I talk about in...

The post Use Strong Passwords and Keep them Safe with KeePass appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.
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										As all three of my regular visitors know, a few months back my server was hacked. It was pretty bad, to the point where I lost a couple of years of blog posts and other information I had on my server. This event prompted me to start walking the walk that I talk about in regards to password safety.




This post talks about Keepass. While Keepass is still a good choice and continues to be updated, I have been using Lastpass and recommend it over any other choice. You can read other posts I've made regarding Lastpass here.



I am leaving this post here for archival purposes.



When I got hacked, I realized that I had 3 or 4 main passwords that I used on a daily basis, and these 3 or 4 passwords if lost, gave you access to over 30 systems I use regularly. From banking to blogging, computers, and voicemail systems, if you got a hold of these few passwords you could have an insider's view into my personal, financial, and mostly private life. Kind of scary if you think about it. Of course, as soon as I found out, I began changing the passwords and making sure no malicious activity had happened.



I've worked in corporate IT shops pretty much my whole life. The corporate policies on passwords are usually pretty good. You need to keep a password, that is at least eight characters long and that contains capital letters, lower case letters, and symbols or numbers. That's pretty good, the problem with that is that most people end up using one or two passwords for all their stuff. If you care about your sensitive information, you'll think twice about doing this in the future. In fact, start now and begin changing your passwords for different systems so that they are unique. I took this as a basis for my new passwords and began working on it. Took me about a day to change all my passwords and a few more minutes later on when I found the occasional



When I was all finished changing passwords so they are all unique and locking my stuff down, I had over 100 usernames and passwords. You may be wondering how I have so many. I have a lot of web accounts, I do most of my banking online and I also have a lot of accounts I use for my consulting business. If you really think about it, you probably have a sizable number of usernames and passwords. Even 10 or 20 passwords can be difficult to manage. So my task was to find a way to manage all the passwords easily and quickly.



I found several little programs on the internet that helped with this. Norton has a password manager application, there is my ex-favorite PINs by Mirek, but I found the best one so far. It's called KeePass Password Safe.



I love KeePass and I live by it now. I have a huge password that unlocks the whole file so I have access to my username and passwords. I think this is a great solution that everybody can use. One of the greatest things about KeePass is that it works on almost anything you can think of. It runs on Windows, it runs on Macs, Linux and other Unix variants. You can even run it on some mobile devices. It is really secure because it is encrypted. Make sure you use a long master password, like a passphrase and then you're pretty safe.



Some of the other key features of KeePass highlight on its maturity as an OpenSource application. You can import and export from and to a variety of formats, you can export certain groups of passwords, this comes in handy when you want to share a group of passwords with colleagues or spouses or for some other reason but you don't want to share your whole database. Another really handy feature of KeePass is its password maker utility, you can specify your password criteria and then have it automatically generate random passwords for you, this is a huge help when trying to come up with unique secure passwords.



This cool little app could even be used in a corporate environment where multiple people need access to the same systems. Like networking equipment, web servers, management consoles, etcetera etcetera. Given that this is OpenSource, cross-platform and easy to use I'm not sure why more companies don't use it. You can even team it up with a version control system so multiple people have access to it and changes are documented as time goes by.
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