This blog is run on wordpress, and I also do quite a bit in PHP, so I’m familiar with the GeSHi syntax highlighter. It’s PHP-based, and can run both as a Wordpress plugin (WP-Syntax) and as a PHP module. It also works quite well with the …

I’ve been having some issues that may be Puppet-related. Unfortunately, Puppet (at least the old 0.25.4 client that I’m running) doesn’t timestamp the debug logs sent to stdout. I know it’s hanging somewhere, but I need concrete numbers to look at. Here’s …

While I know this isn’t best practice, since we use LDAP-based auth for our Linux boxes (including a sudoers file based on LDAP group membership), we usually do work on some boxes as root (sudo su -). This includes our puppetmaster, where configs are kept in subversion and edited …

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 …

So, here’s the “official” scoop on the new project that I’m planning/starting to work on. I’m calling it PHPsa for now, and it’s going to (hopefully) be an integrated dashboard/portal for SysAdmins. While there are a number of tools that fit into this general …

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 …