Opsware, the company I work(ed) for, has been acquired by HP.
November 10th, 2007
we’re not Opsware anymore
January 17th, 2007
wrapping-up
This is my last week at Shodor. I am transitioning to a new job on Monday 22 Jan 2007 with Opsware in Cary as a support engineer.
December 5th, 2006
network monitoring
I’ve been somewhat unsuccessful in getting the new network monitoring up and running. I’ve been trying to get OpenNMS to run, and while getting tomcat5 installed and running under FC6 was straight-forward enough, getting OpenNMS to install keeps returning errors on install.
I’ve also been playing with the most recent edition of Nagios to get a side-by-side comparison. That one’s easier to install, but configuring it is harder.
Oh well, I guess I was expecting too much to just download the packages, run rpm, and have everything magically work.
Posted by wmyers as work at 6:33 PM EST
October 28th, 2006
shodonix 1.04 redux
In generating Shodonix images, I did a lot of package alterations, and it turns out that Ghemical 2.01 had been updated to 2.10 - but in updating the package, a couple libraries updated that broke Intel i810 graphics chip support - which might not be too horrible, but many many educational institutions go for the educational specials when buying workstations, and they tend to have integrated graphics chips, and those are often the Intel i810 line. So, I had to back up to 1.03, then reupdate the CD, which this time included yanking Ghemical. It’s not a vital package, and frees-up space for other applications in the future.
So, in case you ever decide to customize a Knoppix CD, and you have a ‘normal’ PC with integrated Intel graphics, be sure you don’t break the support for the chip.
September 26th, 2006
n-level, m-width tree parsing
I have been programming for several years, and have been exposed to all sorts of problems along the way. However, Friday was about my first opportunity to actually use a tree traversal in a ‘real’ project, not just one assigned by a professor.
As most *nix types are aware, you can set up an aliases file to map addresses onto real world users. The problem with this file is that aliases can get stale, new aliases can be made that end up totally encompassing old ones (unintentionally), etc.
So, the request came about to be able to use a webform to look up where, exactly, an alias points. So, into our work order ticketing system it went, and I started working on it on paper Thursday evening. Turns out that it is not in fact to be a graph problem but rather a tree problem. This is a Good Thing™. Graph problems aren’t horrible to work with, but they are substantially more complex than tree problems.
The general form of the /etc/aliases file is listed above, but I left out an important caveat - aliases can point to a file of delimited targets via the :include: directive. To make a medium-length story pretty short, to parse the aliases file, every line needs to be read, and then tokenized to display the results of a search, recursively.
I suppose you could traverse the tree using a loop-based approach, but heaven help you to handle the corner cases. The only I have to track in traversing the tree is what the most recently checked alias was, and advance to the next one in the list when the check on that iteration is over.
Overall, it turned out to be a really easy to write script, and it’s now live on our site. If you are Shodor staff, you can play with it here.
Posted by wmyers as work at 4:29 PM EDT
September 22nd, 2006
shodonix 1.03
one package was missing, and another was acting up, so the image has been recreated again
we should be one user test away from using the cd in workshops
September 12th, 2006
shodonix 1.01
Right. So, it turns out that if you don’t unmount /proc while chrooted, the iso won’t compress properly, which is what happened to my first attempt. The second following attempt was done from a fresh expansion of Knoppix, and I made sure I unmounted /proc, and everything’s copasetic.
The last thing to get working is the offline edition of Interactivate to load correctly (and fit). I am currently 10M over the limit, and the launch shortcut is wrong, but we’re very close.
August 29th, 2006
boil in bag rice
the first edition of our custom cd is ready - now to test 
August 8th, 2006
shrunken? yes; working? sorta
This is an odd one: I’ve managed to grow my custom linux image from 1.8 to 2.1 gigs, yet it compressed to 657M as an iso. Queer. Now the problem is that I’ve apparently gotten a little too aggressive in trimming, and I can’t log in when it boots.
August 2nd, 2006
more customizing needed
even after shrinking our custom linux/cd install down from the default knoppix size of 2.3G to 1.8G - it won’t compress to fit on a single cd, which leads me to believe that what I’ve stuck on there is already compressed
back to trimming-out unnecessary items 