systems-administration
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What’s the difference between jdk…bin and jdk…-rpm.bin?
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…
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Turned out to be a driver issue
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…
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Appliance cloning saga continues
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…
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Enterprise Backup Project
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…
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Google Video
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.…
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PXE Network Boot Server update
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…
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Sweet, major progress on Cloning appliances
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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Update on the appliances.
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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Who ever knew that “ping” started as a one night hack.
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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Outsource appliance build. – Day 2 – Dirty Notes.
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…