http://blog.loftninjas.org Fri, 12 Feb 2010 07:56:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In less than obvious fashion, Amazon EC2 Windows Server AMIs reset their hostname on startup due to the Ec2ConfigService. To disable this feature, select 'EC2ConfigService Settings' from the start menu, and uncheck the first checkbox under 'Set Computer Name' http://blog.loftninjas.org/2010/02/12/setting-a-permanent-windows-hostname-on-ec2/ First, a bit of social commentary. Sometimes we refer to the way something ought to be accomplished as the RightWay[tm], sarcastically noting that every best practice contains a certain degree of opinion. As we dedicate more time to doing something our way, we become invested in it being the RightWay, and ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2010/01/22/configuration-management-vs-meatcloud-5-reasons-cm-wins/ Well a couple people used the 0.7.16wt1 release, including Thom May who had issues with that version number. Consequently I took out the 'wt' from the version, but this is still an unofficial, unsupported release. I pulled in the changes on Thom's internal branch and grabbed some more low hanging fruit. ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2010/01/07/moar-unofficial-chef-07162/ I've periodically been having DNS lookup issues with internal domains and isolated them to remote SSL VPN clients connecting to a Cisco ASA 5520 using the Anyconnect SSL VPN client. I eventually got frustrated and troubleshooted the issue by using the command line 'vpn' client to initiate a connection on ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2010/01/06/got-recursion-not-available-and-cisco-ssl-vpn/ I sent an email out to the chef list today about releasing an unofficial Chef 0.7.16 fork to tide some of us over until 0.8 ships as Opscode does not plan any more 0.7.x releases. I use this internally at $job and pushed it out to github by request. I ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/12/29/chef-0716wt1-fork-and-more-08-alpha-notes/ The Chef site starts out with, "Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure." There is an important point hidden in that description; Chef is not a CM tool. Of course it can be used as one, and many do, ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/12/24/knife-or-my-tool-is-actually-a-library/ Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {BA785E28-3D7B-47AE-A4F9-4784F61B598A} failed due to the following error: 80070005. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ManagedDTS) Trying to access SSIS (DTS) on Microsoft SQL 2008 with SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 gave the above error. Trying to create a maintenance plan provided the same ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/12/16/error-80070005-accessing-ssisdts-on-sql-2008-and-server-2008/ On Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) I had been generating and setting the root password in a bootstrapping script using: # Generated MD5 encrypted password /usr/bin/openssl passwd -1 # Set the password /bin/echo 'root:ENCRYPTED_PASSWORD' | /usr/sbin/chpasswd -e With shadow 4.1.4, chpasswd now uses PAM, and has dropped the -e option used above, as well as the -c ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/12/07/scripting-the-root-password-on-ubuntu-910-karmic/ Theres push to get Chef 0.8 out the door because we're all anxious for its awesome list of features and fixes, so we're all hunkering down on fixing bugs. Scott Likens has similar notes and theres some more to be found in Dan Deleo's 08boot bootstrap recipe. This should help ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/11/24/installing-chef-08-alpha-on-ubuntu-karmic/ I recently had to install HP's System Management Homepage (SMH) on Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) on hardware I had never touched for Hosted Operations to monitor. The hardware wasn't my choice, but I'm indifferent to it. The operating system is my choice. Apparently they support Debian Lenny (5.0) and Ubuntu Jaunty ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/11/23/hp-smh-on-ubuntu-karmic/ As I look back at growing up in a small town, there was a surprising lack of everyone wanting to move to the city as soon as they could. Perhaps that was because there is not a recognizible city anywhere near coastal eastern Maine. Despite, there still was a lingering ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/11/19/talent-is-human/ I have a number of Windows Server 2008 hosts running under KVM in a remote datacenter and using virt-manager to access libvirt+kvm over SSH for a remote console was disappointly slow, so I set out to try libvirt+kvm over SSL/TLS for comparison. In the process of which I had to ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/11/17/libvirt-kvm-tls-authentication-on-ubuntu-karmic/ It's no secret that I think configuration management is epic. I spent yesterday hopping around the office in excitement due to Opscode's alpha announcement of their new Cookbooks site. This is exactly the next step needed in the CM community. Shortly thereafter, while talking with another developer about how awesome ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/10/30/opscode-cookbooks-community-announced/ Windows Server 2008 R2 currently requires the beta version of winpcap, and you need to run the installer in compatibility mode to install it. Download wireshark Down the winpcap 4.1 beta Right click the winpcap installer, properties, compatibility mode, set to server 2008 Install wincap Install wireshark Open an administrative command prompt (right click, run as ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/10/14/wireshark-winpcap-beta-on-windows-server-2008-r2/ Best I can tell, there is some functionality missing from traditional etherboot images that you can install on Ubuntu via the 'kvm-pxe' package that prevents a KVM guest from booting off of a Windows Deployment Services (WDS) server. Perhaps UNDI or such, it isn't clear. The guest will accept an ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/09/25/pxe-booting-ubuntu-kvm-guests-off-wds/ kvm-img convert small.img small.raw # this is your old image kvm-img create large.raw 15G # or whatever size losetup /dev/loop0 small.raw losetup /dev/loop1 large.raw dd if=/dev/loop0 of=/dev/loop1 losetup -d /dev/loop0 losetup -d /dev/loop1 kvm-img convert large.raw large.qcow2 Start KVM up again with the new large image. Go to the 'Computer Management' mmc applet under 'Administrative Tools'. Choose ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/09/08/increasing-a-win7-diskpartition-under-kvm/ Needing to set 'Password Never Expires' across an entire OU in Active Directory, I managed to write a powershell script to accomplish as much. Sure is nice having scripting languages on Windows machines beyond BASIC. [code] # Finds all user objects in the searchroot and forces the password never expires value in ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/09/04/setting-password-never-expires-programmatically-in-ad/ The openid-ldap project provides a simple OpenID to LDAP gateway that supports Active Directory so you can leverage your existing SSO database hosted in LDAP to provide OpenID logins. All the documentation lives in docs/README. Configuration is mostly a matter of unpacking the source into an apache hosted directory, editing ldap.php ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/08/10/using-openid-ldap-as-an-openid-provider/ I'm migrating a number of internal web application databases off of a mysql server and I wanted a way to see which databases are being accessed and by which hosts. # tshark -R "mysql.opcode == 2" -e ip.src -e mysql.schema -T fields port mysql When run on the mysql server this produces ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/07/13/monitoring-which-mysql-databases-are-being-accessed/ I've amassed enough mysql databases that it's time there should be some high availability. Note that this isn't a single huge database, it's a pile of wordpress, request-tracker, mediawiki, etc databases. Performance isn't the goal here, it is automatic failover in case of impending doom. I happen to have an iSCSI ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/07/10/making-sense-of-mysql-ha-options/ Playing with drbd8 on Ubuntu, loosely following these instructions, and I ran into a couple problems. First, you need to use a kernel that has the drbd module as there is no drbd8-module-source, -server definitely has the drbd module, -virtual did not. Instructions about building the drbd module are old. My secondary ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/07/10/a-couple-notes-on-drbd-on-ubuntu/ Upon returning from Open Source Bridge in Portland last week, I collected my thoughts from the convergence of configuration management developers and wrote The Configuration Management Revolution, centered around the idea the something bigger is happening than we're acknowledging. Today Tim O'Reilly posted a blog entry about the origins of Velocity. ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/06/22/infrastructure-as-a-code-sample/ The revolution is coming, and it's about time I wrote about it. About a year and a half ago I was settling in to a new system administration job at a startup. I was told a consulting company would be coming in to bootstrap configuration management for us. I had previously ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/06/20/the-configuration-management-revolution/ I recently upgraded Dell OMSA to 6.0.1 on a number of Ubuntu Intrepid and Jaunty hosts using sara.dl's packages and got a warning that the mptsas driver version 3.04.07 was below the minimum supported version. The version from 'modinfo mptsas' confirmed I was on the right track looking at this ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/06/05/lsi-mptlinux-mptsas-31229-on-ubuntu/ I'm no fan of software raid. Pretty much, ever. At my last job, for whom I still consult, my predecessor was really into technology creep. All of the workstations used that awesome fake raid that is actually implemented in the mass storage driver and is therefore pretty useless and can ... http://blog.loftninjas.org/2009/06/02/recovering-from-a-windows-server-2003-mirrored-dynamic-disk-failure/