I had a user ask for Java to be installed on the cluster systems, so I started up by making a simple JRE5 module for puppet, but this first one didn’t quite work: class jre5 { package { “sun-java5-jre”: ensure => latest; } } It doesn’t work because Sun wants you to agree to its …
Author Archives: renfro
Obscure Puppet Error #1
(First in a series of some finite positive number, for the greater edification of Googlers everywhere.) If you get an error of err: Could not retrieve catalog: Could not parse for environment development: Syntax error at ‘Debian’ at /etc/puppet/master/manifests/os/Debian.pp:1 on a Debian.pp that only has one line of class Debian {}, just go ahead and …
The autostow is Dead, Long Live stowedpackage!
I had posted earlier about distributing stowed packages via rsync and puppet to my managed systems, but that method wasn’t quite what I wanted: There was one more file to manage outside my regular puppet manifests, and I’d have to remember to keep them both up to date and in sync. There wasn’t an easy …
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Getting an email list for your class from Web For Faculty
For all the improvements Web For Faculty/Advisors may have over the old SIS system, it sure doesn’t make it easy to generate an email list from your class roll. I can see who’s in my class, click on a flagrant abuse of the HTML select element to see their permanent address, phone numbers, off-campus email …
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Python!
I also love python. — From XKCD, 2007/12/05
It’s PowerPoint Tips Time
I’ll dig up some of my older references later, but all these showed up on my radar in the last few days. I’ll want to refer back to these next summer when we have more NSF REU students here that need presentation pointers: Stop Death By PowerPoint Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in …
Grabbing Stills and Making FLV Movies from Axis IP Cameras
About a week and a half ago, I was reminded of a long-dormant project to archive still images from an Axis IP camera. I started this up a few years ago as a favor to a coworker, but it never really got finished. Previously, it was a pretty simple cron job that would just authenticate …
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Client Configuration Management
Back at the infrastructures.org mothership, client configuration management is described as everything that makes a host unique and/or part of a particular group or domain. And for Unix-like systems, everything pretty much comes down to configuration files, services being enabled/disabled, and cron jobs. Hmm. Configuration files Services Cron jobs Looks like Puppet pretty much handles …
Client File Access
The infrastructures.org folks list two primary goals of what they call “client file access“: first, consistent access to users’ home directories, and second, consistent access to end-user applications. Some of the things they warn against, such as automounters and the /net directory, we never thought of using to begin with. Their need to consider systems …
File Replication Servers
Back when the infrastructures.org folks were writing their pages, the page for file replication servers described a need to keep current copies of configuration files in /etc and all programs and other data from /usr/local on all the managed systems. In puppet structures, every file or other resource is just a part of a higher-order …