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Time to bring the Solaris workstations into our new infrastructure, to discover all the hidden Debian-specific parts in my Puppet manifests, and then fix them to be platform-neutral. First off, I need to be able to ensure a common base installation on my Solaris systems, and to have that base be as hands-off as possible. …
Continue reading “Solaris Jumpstart Installations In An All-Debian Environment”
This ad-laden page at about.com talks about why you might want to send emails as plain text by default (bandwidth, misbehaving HTML support in email clients, etc.). Never mind any ugly stationery you might have to look at. So I receive an email memo informing me that since some group of people had trouble printing …
I’m coming to the realization that my email inbox is not a task management system, it’s an inbox. I don’t need to abuse it as a list of things I need to do, I just need to grab the necessary details from the email and create a regular task in my Treo’s Tasks application. But …
I keep around a lot of project and class materials, both paper and electronic. As far as paper goes: 1 lateral file drawer of B.S. and M.S. class materials 1 lateral file drawer of regular work materials 2 lateral file drawers emptied within the last few months. These mostly contained student tests, projects, and records …
I know I’m late to the game with this part of my setup, but nonetheless, I’m happy with the results. The short form of it is that Debian’s nagios-nrpe-server package lets my central Nagios server keep track of my clients’ disk space, load averages, etc. Granted, I already had most of that visible through Ganglia, …
Continue reading “Watching Remote System Status with Nagios and NRPE”
So I’ve got Debian packages made from lots of large proprietary software titles, but one of them (Hyperworks) had been throwing errors on several of the systems I tried to install it on, normally something like: Setting up hyperworks8 (8.1+0.2) … update-alternatives: slave link name /usr/bin/amfbuilder duplicated dpkg: error processing hyperworks8 (–configure): subprocess post-installation script …
Continue reading “Solution to a Vexing update-alternatives Problem”
A student working in one of our labs noticed that a piece of equipment had dead batteries, and asked me to get replacements. Nothing special, just 6 regular D-cells. The next day or so, I head to Lowe’s, and use my university card to pick them up for around $9.50, tax-exempt, for 8 batteries. I …
New mail server went in this afternoon. I did forget to email the few non-administrative users we have on it ahead of time. My fault. But among other things, the new server has postgrey installed for greylisting. In the first six hours, we greylisted 136 emails, and 30 got resent. So that’s roughly 100 spam …
Continue reading “To greylisting: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
Stupid Winamp. I update it on my laptop last weekend, and suddenly none of the MS Office products work any more. Stupid MS Ofice. After I get back to the office, I try to repair it by pointing it at the setup files it’s been looking for all weekend, but it doesn’t like those setup …
Click the image below for a full size version: And no, the IRS doesn’t have a site ending in .ir (that’s Iran).