Solaris Jumpstart Installations In An All-Debian Environment

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. …

Filing 29 GB of Project Materials

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 …

Watching Remote System Status with Nagios and NRPE

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, …

Solution to a Vexing update-alternatives Problem

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 …

To greylisting: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

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 …