I was setting up a shiny new CentOS 7 EC2 instance, but when I tried to set the hostname using all of the typical Linux-y ways, none of them stuck after a reboot. It just kept going back to the default EC2 naming convention of ‘ip-172.31.x.x’. Since I am still getting used to CentOS 7 and all of the stuff they changed from 6, I figured it was a CentOS 7 thing. Not so…
Adding TLS cert via CLI on Juniper SRX
Configuring TACACS+ on Juniper SRX and Windows Active Directory
I’m sure someone has already documented this somewhere, but here are my usual breadcrumbs. After pouring through Juniper’s thorough, yet scattered, documentation I finally got my SRX talking to Windows Ad via TACACS+.
I decided to go with TACACS.net, a free (not as in beer, though) command line oriented service that runs on Windows. It’s a very nice program and really cool that it can be downloaded for free. They charge for support, so I guess that’s how they keep the lights on. Read more
Windows – Can’t delete local printer port
Another reason I hate dealing with MS. I have had this issue with every version of Windows as far back as I can remember so obviously they will never fix the code. So, you want to reconfigure a non-working printer or remove an old entry in the printer server “Ports” tab. But Windows won’t let you – it says that the “Resource is in use.” Huh? I deleted the printer, now I just want to delete the local/TCP port. Turns out there might have been old jobs sticking around and they need to be cleared out first. Uggh.
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/peripherals/w/printers/18.delete-print-jobs
This isn’t my solution, but I just want to give a shout out to the guy who posted it and hopefully one extra link will give him that much more Google ranking cred.
WordPress Auto Updates
There has been a lot already posited on this subject, but in my corner of the WP world I figured I’d throw in my $0.02. As someone who has been involved with IT for some time now, I’m well versed on the double-edged blade that is auto-updates. On one hand it offers a respite for weary, overworked tech folk, but on the other hand updates are no different from the rest of the software development process – bugs are inevitable and bad things can happen. Read more
Most Awesome CMS Ever – Part Deux
In a previous post, I wrote about a CMS called GPeasy. That post actually seems to still get a lot of hits, which might lead the visitors to wonder why I raved about GPeasy when I am using WP as my CMS/blog platform. Good question. At the time I decided to go with a CMS, WP was starting to get really good at being both a CMS and blogging platform and GPeasy was still being baked. But I might have to revisit GPeasy as it looks like they’ve added some cool features.Of course, I also stumbled upon Octopress the other day, which seems to be an interesting blog platform geared towards hackers with a lot of ways to show code, etc. I might have to check that out as well. Options abound!
Allowing non-root users access to libvirt and virsh using polkit
I’ve been using virt-manager to manage my KVM hosts and I’m not keen on having to login to the remote hosts as root, plus I would get the password prompt every time I connect to the server (sure I could setup my pulic SSH key on the root account, but not a good idea to use RSA auth to the root account on a remote server). With Debian (Wheezy) it was fairly simple in that all that I had to do was add my regular username to the group “libvirt”. Then I could use the URI: qemu+ssh://virtadmin@my.kvmhost.com/system to connect to the remote KVM host using virt-manager.
Resizing my LVM based virtual disk
So I needed to upgrade my mail server but realized I only had 5GB of space left on the /opt partition and the upgrade complained about needing more than 5GB. Not sure why I didn’t size the whole virtual disk a little bigger in the first place. Also not sure why I didn’t set Zabbix to warn me when the disk space got that low. Hindsight and all of that. So following other’s recipes this is how I resized my LVM based virtual disk, and then subsequently resized the partitions within the VM.
KVM – Converting from QCOW2 to Raw
I needed to move some of my VMs from local storage to my shared iSCSI LVM volume. I figured it involved qemu-img so I went to the interwebs to find how others did it. Well, whaddya know, this recipe was perfect: http://bigmyx.blogspot.com/2012/03/convert-kvm-qcow2-file-to-lvm-disk.html
Thanks bygmyx!
Virtualization – Still Rollin’
Almost There
Virtualization has been near and ear to my heart ever since I started using VMware workstation in the late ’90s. I’m sure the ol’ mainframe guys are thinking “pffft, boy, I’ve been virtualizing my *nix and VMS/VAX instances while you were plinking away on your Apple IIe in middle school.” Which is one reason I keep this Dilbert comic on my board at work:
