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I am looking forward to presenting “Bastille: Secure Container Automation” at SCaLE18x. This demonstrates the container automation I’ve layered atop FreeBSD’s mature container system, jails. Bastille is an open-source system for automating deployment and management of containerized applications on FreeBSD. * Bastille uses FreeBSD Jailsas the container platform.To learn more about getting started with containers on FreeBSD see the Bastille Getting Started Guide.

Earlier today I was working with Dell Support to gather information about a broken system. It was suggested that I use their DSET utility to gather data and return a report. The problem is, DSET doesn’t natively support CentOS, so some tweaks were needed in order for it to run properly. In this post I’ll outline the changes I needed to make in order to run DSET on CentOS 6.2. Step 1: Download the DSET utility using wget. wget ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/FOLDER00481758M/1/dell-dset-3.2.0.141_x64_A01.bin Step 2: Create a working directory and extract the archive mkdir ~/dell tail -n+20 dell-dset-3.2.0.141_x64_A01.bin | tar -xzv -C ~/dell Note: If you get an error saying that the file is not in a valid archive format, you may need to alter the tail command slightly. Use the following command to determine the line at which the archive begins: awk '/^__ARCHIVE_BELOW__/ {print NR + 1; exit 0; }' dell-dset-3.2.0.141_x64_A01.bin Step 3: Trick the installer into thinking you’re running a supported OS Read more

I’ve started a new blog that I’d like to announce called Into the Salt Mine. This blog will focus solely on using the suite of free software applications developed by Salt Stack. This includes configuration management, remote execution, cloud provisioning and more. The goal is to provide regular tips and updates on managing systems using Salt and related tools. If you haven’t heard of Salt yet, I’d highly recommend checking out the 30 second summary and consider using Salt to manage your systems.

This morning I finally found a solution to improving vim-usage on my FreeBSD machines. For the longest time I’ve dealt with little annoyances like arrow-keys entering ABCD characters, and backspace only working in certain situations. As it turns out, all I needed was to import a proper vimrc file. As soon as I had tested the fix, I expanded my vim Salt State to include a symlink to the included example vimrc. states/vim/init.sls: `/root/.vimrc:file.symlink: target: /usr/local/share/vim/vim73/vimrc_example.vim` This state breaks down as follows: /root/.vimrc – File to create file.symlink – Use the symlink function (others include file.managed, and file.directory) -target: /usr/local/share/vim/vim73/vimrc_example.vim – Path to original file Finally I applied the state using the state.sls module, applying only the vim state: [root@starbuck ~]# salt-call state.sls vim<br /> local:<br /> ----------<br /> State: - file<br /> Name: /root/.vimrc<br /> Function: symlink<br /> Result: True<br /> Comment: Created new symlink /root/.vimrc<br /> Changes: new: /root/. Read more

I’ve had a 13″ Macbook for about your years now. When I learned about MacPorts I was really happy to know I could run newer software, and compile things to my liking. These days I run a development environment on my Macbook, all built using MacPorts. This post covers how to leverage ccache in compiling your MacPorts. ccache is a compiler cache utility that increases the efficiency of your compiles by reusing cached build data, often improving build times by 5-10 times! Step 1: Install ccache sudo port install ccache Step2: Edit macports.conf” Open /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf in your favorite editor. Find the line ‘configureccache’ (near line 65) configureccache no and change it to configureccache yes You’re done! New compiles will now use ccache. note: ccache stores it’s cached date in your home directory, ie; /Users/$username/.ccache. It defaults to a maximum cache storage size of 1G. You can find out more about the ccache settings via the ‘ccache -s’ command. Read more

Dell Latitude E5500 Wireless – Fedora 14 I recently needed to send my main work machine in for repairs so I temporarily used a Dell Latitude E5500 while my normal D630 was away. Boy did I have trouble with the hardware on this machine! This blog post is a meagre attempt at outlining what was required of me to get some hardware supported. Hopefully this helps some other poor soul along the way. **Wireless Driver ** In order to enable Wireless on the Dell Latitude E5500 (bcm4322), you’ll need to follow the steps below. This requires a “nonfree” driver from the rpmfusion repository, as well as an addition to the kernel parameter in GRUB. It’s not so bad once you know the requirements, the trouble is finding the requirements (again, the reason for this post!) Install the rpmfusion nonfree repository using the command: rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm With this repository now added, you’ll be able to install the broadcom-wl package. Read more

I’ve been reconfiguring my Irssi installation this morning and wanted to document the steps I took. I use irssi on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. Required Certificates In order to connect securely over SSL to freenode you need to ensure you have the certificate installed. On FreeBSD, this port is ca_root_nss. portmaster security/ca_root_nss Configure the Network and Server /network add -nick 'nick' -realname 'real name' freenode<br /> /server add -auto -ssl_verify -ssl_cafile /usr/local/share/certs/ca-root-nss.crt -network freenode chat.freenode.net 7000<br /> /save Note: If the blog wraps the content, there are three commands above, prefixed with /. /network, /server and /save. Now, when you open irssi, you’ll automagically connect to Freenode over SSL.

I spent some time this afternoon setting up a public git repository for my project, Origami. I had a little bit of trouble getting the repository set up initially, particularly the cgi aspect of it all. Below outlines the steps I took to configure Lighttpd for gitweb, hosted on FreeBSD. Installation First, of course, I installed the git port: portmaster devel/git I made sure to select the gitweb option, which is de-activated by default. The other options are up to you. Configuration Second, I configured Lighttpd in the simplest manner I could find. This solution uses the existing gitweb files in-place. This is contrary to what the pkg-message prescribes, but I like this idea because it’ll ensure that upgrades are handled automatically. I don’t plan to run any additional repositories either, so using the one central set of files is preferable in my situation. This is my configuration: Read more

I reinstalled my Dell Latitude D630 this afternoon using the new Arch Linux installer (2010.05) netinstall. I had an issue however where the live image would start to boot and then I’d get a blank screen. I quickly realized what the problem was, and found a fix. Note: it looks like it is a similar issue to the one found here. Basically, the fix that I found, was to append the following to the kernel line at the initial boot prompt: nomodeset This is done by hitting the [TAB] key at the boot prompt of the installer and appending that text to the end. I wanted to get this out in hopes that it’d help others with the same problem. Good luck, and happy Arch’ing.

Today I built some virtual machines on a KVM platform (Ubuntu 10.04 Server as the host). The three virtual machines are CentOS 5, i386 and will be used primarily for internal application testing. One of the requirements for using these machines in a virtual environment was configuring back-end console access from the host. The virtual machine management tools (virsh) provide custom commands to console into your guest machines, but the guest machines need to be configured to output to the proper console. This article outlines what customizations I made to the CentOS 5 virtual machines in order to console into them from the host using ‘virsh console ’ GRUB The first modifications that I needed to make were in GRUB. On CentOS the GRUB config file can be found at: /boot/grub/menu.lst. Below you’ll find the changes I made: default=0<br /> timeout=5<br /> #splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz<br /> serial --unit=0 --speed=115200<br /> terminal --timeout=10 console serial<br /> hiddenmenu Read more