Recently at $WORK we’ve been having some strange issues with a particular Xen VM not getting DHCP. Traditional (tail -f dhcpd.log) debugging hasn’t turned up much, other than the server is getting the DISCOVER but not sending out an OFFER. I’ve turned to packet captures to …

I needed a better solution for Dynamic DNS than dyndns.org for something, so I set about setting up DDNS through my BIND9 servers. I found a number of very helpful blog posts, including nsupdate: Painless Dynamic DNS, Painless DDNS part 2: the server, Secure dynamic DNS howto and A …

Yesterday I was installing a new machine at $WORK, and we’d been having some spotty problems with Anaconda not being able to find RPMs in a specific repository. As a result, I was standing in the machine room at a cart-mounted console, watching the output of the installation. Just …

Last week I added some of my Nagios check scripts to my nagios-scripts GitHub repository. Perhaps they’ll be of some use to some other people…

• check_1wire_temps.php
  • quick and dirty, built for one specific application, but a good starting place for checking Dallas 1-wire temperatures via OWFS.
• check_802dot11.php …

If you’re just looking for the script or PHP module, you can get them at: http://github.com/jantman/php-nagios-xml.

A while ago (back in late 2008), I wrote a PHP script that parses the Nagios status.dat file into an associative array. My original use was to output …

This is a follow-up to my Making maps from GIS data with Inkscape post. After playing around with Inkscape for quite a while, and coming up with the dismal results seen in that post, I decided there has to be an easier way. A little Googling turned up this video …

In playing with Puppet (0.24.8 on clients and server) today (well, building a new host) I came by a strange error when I ran puppet on the client:

err: Could not request certificate: Certificate retrieval failed: Invalid pattern css-storemanager

The thing that was so strange is that “css-storemanager …

At $WORK, my group runs about two dozen servers that provide services for over 60,000 users. They’re a mix of Windows and Linux, with some old Solaris stuff thrown in there. The one thing they have in common is they’re all hand-built, hand-configured, and old. They’ve …

Well, I finally broke down and ordered Optimum Business. Come tomorrow, I’ll be moving from Verizon FiOS residential with a dynamic IP, much blocked (hence jantman.dyndns.org:10011) and 10Mbps down/2Mbps up to Optimum Business with 30 down/5 up, a block of 5 static IPs, and …

Updated 2009-03-05, see bottom.

At work the other week, we decommissioned 24 old desktops - Dell GX280’s that were used in the student labs as print release stations. They didn’t have anything sensitive on them, just Windows XP, but with licensing and all we have to wipe Windows off …