FUDCon and FrOSCamp Day Two

After the official party called “wired dreams” @StuZ on Friday, I was a bit late and arrived @ETH in the early afternoon. At 14:00 there was the (from my point of view) probably best workshop, it was about Puppet. Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management tool. For more information see http://www.puppetlabs.com/. There is also a Swiss Puppet User Group. It seems to mostly active in western Switzerland. The second interesting talk was about collectd, a ….Read More

RHN Satellite 5.4 release in sight

When analyzing recent Bugzilla-reports and mailing list posts, we can expect a RHN Satellite release quite soon. Why? The main reason for this is the lack of SHA256 support in sat530. Since RHEL6 packages having SHA256 checksums, the release of Satellite 5.4 is a prerequisite for releasing RHEL6. As always there will also be a large load of bugfixes included. Expected new features yum repository syncronising Support for SHA256 checksums Maybe support for SHA384 checksums Support for Oracle 11g databases ….Read More

Spacewalk 1.0 released

Spacewalk 1.0 has been released Spacewalk is the upstream project for Red Hat’s RHN Satellite software, one of the best systems management software available for Linux Systems. In the past few weeks one could see a lot of git commits on the source repository of spacewalk. There is no changelog available yet. The road map mentioned compatibility with Apache Tomcat 6.0.x to be able to install spacewalk on Fedora12 and RHEL6. There should have also been several enhancements in the ….Read More

Writing trigger scripts for cobbler does not work at the moment

At the moment, shell scripts as triggers wont work with cobbler. This is due to a bug. Unfortunately the developers wont fix it in the next few weeks or even months. Triggers are a very welcome and powerful method to automate things before, during after installation of a system. At the moment it only works with python scripts. Since not every sysadmin knows python, but everyone knows to write bash scripts, this is a major drawback. Cobbler is included in ….Read More

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released

End of April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 was released. As always it is based on Debian’s Testing-Release. Canonical “stabilizes” the testing tree of Debian and adds its own look. This time, Ubuntu radically changed its look. From my point of view it looks ugly, very ugly. Strange colors, low contrasts in menus, orange icons in Nautilus… window buttons on the left side… At the end of the day an usability-horror. Under the hood Ubuntu is a very stable distribution with recent ….Read More

Set up a Red Hat Directory Server and Kerberos Part I

Kerberos and LDAP are today’s way of single sign on. It is platform independent and supported by a wide range of applications. Together with the Red Hat Directory Server (also available as CentOS Directory Server and 389 Directory Server from Fedora) you can build a neat identity management infrastructure. Setting up the Directory Server However there are some pitfalls when installing such a integrated solution. Installing redhat-ds is quite easy, just ensure you define your planned LDAP Namespace and default ….Read More

Managing CentOS with Spacewalk

Red Hat RHN Satellite In 2003 Red Hat released its RHN Satellite server as a closed source management tool for RHEL and only for RHEL (okay, a legacy support for managing Solaris is available). The satellite is very useful tool for managing systems. Unfortunately it has a quite expensive price tag on it. According to the Red Hats RHN FAQ the bill is USD 13,500/year. Additionally to the RHN satellite subscription fee you need at least a subscription for the ….Read More