Puppeteering with Puppet
by Ryan on Mar.20, 2013, under Linux, Puppet, Servers
So I’ve been a very naughty sysadmin recently, one of the things I intended to do early on in my new employment was setup some form of System Management as we have several Linux hosts. However truth be told I have never had a System Management system for Linux hosts (due to a lack of time to implement one) and due to a number of tight deadlines I’ve had to put this on the back burner and spin up servers for additional roles.
This road however will lead to ruin so I have put a stop to the random spinning up of hosts for anything other than testing until I get something in place to mange all the configurations centrally. The question for me was what to use, I’ve heard of both Puppet and Chef, but I have no experience of them. So after doing a bit of reading I figured I’d go with Puppet as it seems to have most of the bases I am interested in covered.
SCCM CDP to WMI version 0.0.0.3 out
by Ryan on Jan.06, 2013, under C++, CDP to WMI, Cisco, Coding/Scripting, Projects, SCCM SMS, Sys Admin, Windows
Sorry for the lack of progress until recently but I’ve recently had a lot of more important priorities in life so working on this had to go on hold for a little while. I am hoping in the next few months to release version 1.0 but as on now this is still experimental so should only be used in a lab environment.
Please use the ticketing system on sourceforge to report any issues and add feature requests.
You can get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdptowmi/
ToDo:
See here: https://sourceforge.net/p/cdptowmi/wiki/ToDo%20List/ (work in progress)
Setting up a Cisco network for video developers Part 2
by Ryan on Dec.04, 2012, under Cisco, Linux, Routing, Servers, Switching, Sys Admin, VLANs
Introduction
Welcome to Part 2, this part will provide the background and current topology that is to be replaced, the real fun will start in Part 3. I know you are all impatient to get started configuring switches, routers and servers but I think that the design and the reasons behind the design are as important (if not more so) than the actual configuration. As always I know I am not perfect and all knowing so if from the background and the following tutorials you think I have missed something or could have done something better then please speak up, send me a message via the contact page or leave a comment.
Background
NINet has grown since the last series and now has a floor of approximately 40 developers developing video solutions. The current solution was put together in bits and pieces and is resulting in poor performance and frequent outages. It must be stressed that this is a development network and as such cannot be locked down developers need to be able to connected unmanged switches (much to my irritation) and connect devices at will.
Setting up a Cisco network for video developers Part 1
by Ryan on Dec.04, 2012, under Cisco, Linux, Routing, Switching, Sys Admin, VLANs
Introduction
This series of tutorials will be similar to my posts on a wireless setup, where I take a real world requirement of mine and fit it to a tutorial about NINet.org.
Summary
This series will take an existing flat topology with mixed switches running in L2 and convert it to a Cisco Switch Topology mixing L3 and L2. Then we’ll take a bit of step into the sysadmin side of things where we setup infrastructure servers to support the end users. At the time of this writing, in the real world, this network is up and running however the supporting infrastructure is a lower priority than other work items so it may take a while to filter through to here.
TFS Warehouse Cube Status via SOAP and Powershell
by Ryan on Oct.31, 2012, under Coding/Scripting, powershell, Sys Admin, TFS, Windows
Well I’ve just been put in charge of managing our TFS infrastructure so here is the first of hopefully many posts around automating and managing TFS.
The attached script runs a SOAP query against the TFS Warehouse Cube and returns the jobs and their status and then either generates an HTML file or sends an HTML email with the results.
I recommend creating a directory called Scripts on the C:\ drive and setting the permissions so that only the System Administrator & User the script runs as can access the contents of the directory.
Setting & Getting AD Properties during SCCM OSD Task sequence
by Ryan on Oct.31, 2012, under Coding/Scripting, SCCM SMS, Sys Admin, vbs, Windows
This is a script I wrote over a year ago but have only just rediscovered, I can’t remember if it works / or if I ever used it in production. But hopefully will be of use to someone (assuming it works).
If anyone tries it please respond and let me know how worked / any issues you had.
Scripted checking of SCCM Backups
by Ryan on Oct.31, 2012, under Coding/Scripting, powershell, SCCM SMS, Sys Admin, Windows
This is a script that parses the smsbkup.log and outputs results (in html) and the relevant portions of the file to the specified folder. The idea being that the with a small bit of tweaking you could have the report hosted on a webserver to check or emailed (there will be a post on emailing in Powershell later) to you.
This is best run from the central primary under credentials that have access to the other sites.
Note: The script requires UNC paths for the $fpath variable as it is expecting be be run remotely.
Note2: This script was written for SCCM 2007 and not for SCCM 2012, however thanks to one of my readers, Satish, the following should fix that:
Change
if ($content | where {$_ -like "Backup task completed successfully*"}) {
to
if ($content | where{$_ -like "*SQL Backup task completed successfully*"}) {
CentOS 6 authorized_keys bug
by Ryan on Oct.09, 2012, under Linux, Servers, Sys Admin
Thanks to the footnote here: http://blog.firedaemon.com/2011/07/27/passwordless-root-ssh-public-key-authentication-on-centos-6/
On centos systems that are refusing keybased authentication run the following command as root
#> restorecon -R -v /root/.ssh
Deploy Centos 6 from VMWare Template
by Ryan on Sep.20, 2012, under Coding/Scripting, Linux, Servers, shell, Sys Admin, Virtualization
This is just a quick gotcha that I found ages ago then forgot about and then had to figure out again. Before you convert the VM to a template.
rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
sed -i ‘/HWADDR*/d’ /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
sed -i ‘/UUID*/d’ /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
Update:
This also applies to SLES 11 SP2 (use /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0)
Comments now require moderation
by Ryan on Aug.02, 2012, under General, Site
Sorry to all who do post here, but due to a large influx of spam comments over the last couple of weeks I have now enabled comment moderation, so comments will only appear after I approve them. Sadly this is the only way I can ensure those of you who follow the RSS feed dont get spammed.
Ryan
