f00bar.com

Octopressed

2011-12-10T17:43:00-08:00

Posterous just doesn’t support markdown very well, and every time I felt like writing a blog entry I would get frustrated. So after a couple people have expressed their pleasure with tools like jekyll using github pages. I decided to give it a go.

I love this setup. I tried jumping in with octopress without the rtfm. Having never setup github pages before i mucked up by creating a project site vs a user site, but once I fixed that (by creating a spheromak.github.com repo) everything clicked in.

Pulling old posterous posts down into jekyll was simple, and now im off and running with real markdown blog. Backed by git, and I am happier for it.

So thanks github, jekyll, and octopress for cool software that works

XenServer and shadow passwords

2011-11-02T00:00:00-07:00

Why doesn’t XenServer enable shadow passwords or authconfig. What year is this 1996 ? My guess is so that it can readd the hashed root without privs for things like xencenter to be able to edit the passwd via xapi. Tho i don’t see any password manipulation api hooks. I am really curious why this isnt set.

I have been manually (well chef does it) setting the dom0 passwords to shadow by detecting if its a xenserver and running pwconv. There hasn’t been any repercussions in the last 3 years.

Untill now.

Now moving up to xen6 in my test pool im running into all sortsa auth isues requireing me to single user my upgraded Hosts and pwconv and passwd them. Blargh.

Hosts File LWRP for chef

2011-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

Just finished making a simple LWRP for managing /etc/hosts with chef check it out on github: https://github.com/spheromak/cookbooks/tree/master/hosts

pretty simple/easy to use to manage individual entries in hosts files.

Arch Linux Developer Vagrant Box

2011-09-21T00:00:00-07:00

Vagrant is sweet!, but there wasn’t a lot of arch boxes out there that i could find. So heres my Vagrantfile.

if you don’t already use Vagrant you should. If you are doing any dev you should use it! if your an ops person then you should use it, and tell your developers about it. If you are a nerd you should use Vagrant. Nuf said.

Arch is also pretty sweet. Arch Linux has a system approach that rings totally right with me (I feel another post about arch in here someplace). Mainly Arch lets you do what you want how you want which is awesome!

Anyhow I have a little pet project that originally I was gonna do an LFS build up on, but realized arch already had a lot of what I needed. systemd support, and an not ancient/screwed up ruby install.

My build deviates from base arch in these ways:
- It’s running 3.0.4 Kernel
- Using systemd (with option to boot sysv)
- full developer toolchain.
- ABS the source build system for Arch.
- Its big! ~1.2GB for a base box is pretty big, but its cause of all the build crap + kernel source

Lastly heres the links to the base box if you don’t want to get it via the vagrantfile.

Simple robust OS detection in bash using $OSTYPE

2011-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

I was using lazyweb to solve this problem. Google’s results had solutions where people were calling all sorts of commands and parsing different files to detect system types. I didn’t want to do a syscall. I wanted this solution to be as platform independant as possible. I only needed to know if it was linux/solaris/osx/bsd etc etc. Not version or somehting special. SImple enough. 1 minute of RTFM’n the bash manual turned up $OSTYPE and $HOSTTYPE

Man I love simple solutions!

P.S. First post!

P.P.S posterious’s syntax support sucks. took longer to figure out than this post did to write.

edit: converted to markdown used gist for code highlight