It's always the little things that get you in IT
Not too long ago I was tasked with deploying a decent number of CentOS 5.3 and Redhat servers to BL490 blades and VMs in our datacenter (part of a massive environment deployment with HP C7000 enclosures, virtual connect, and a lot of patience). I hate manual configuration so I figured now is as good of time as any to get on the kickstart bandwagon. Here is how I did it:
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Here are a few scripts that I have cobbled together over the last few years. They are small and useful but nothing earth-shattering. One gets information about a remote system and who is logged in. The other can remotely reset the administrator password. Both obviously require you have the permissions to do so on the remote machines. Both accept multiple computer names divided by a semi-colon. Save and change the extension from .txt to .hta
Don’t have much time due to work obligations but I wanted to quickly drop this one out there for any who have followed my install guides. I was always ragging on and on about making the install somewhat portable by putting it into the /opt/ directory and now I’ll give a good example why.
I’ve been trying to get this one out for weeks but have not had a whole lot of time to do so. I’ve decided to drop what I have completed out there for those who may be interested. Simply put bridgetun is a convenient way to create tun interfaces and to bridge them (and other interfaces) together. I’d give it a once over and see if it helps with any of your dynamips labs. I’ll try to have a quick howto and explanation of why it would be useful as soon as I can but I give no promises 
Setup SMART Disk Monitoring
If your disk is going bad no one going to tell you about it until you start hearing it. And if you start hearing issues with your drive it may be too late to backup your data or do anything else you need to do to not be driveless. I’m uncertain why some of this is not available as an install option for more distros but a good warning before the storm can save your data and your sanity.
Ok, so far we have gone through the hoops to get GNS3 with dynamips/dynagen working nicely in an (almost) fully contained directory in /opt. We then went through choosing an IOS image that is right for you, if you actually have multiple legal images to choose from of course. Now lets setup a pix firewall. The PIX is out of life as far as Cisco is concerned and had been superseded by the ASA line of security devices. But, there are still a lot of the PIX around and the concepts haven’t changed too much between them. So let us go through the motions already! Read More >>
Here is another one that you may find useful to do after a default install of probably any Linux server, Disabling extra stuff from loading at startup. Ubuntu loads a ton of them and many I do not use at all. Since when do you need joystick or sound support on a server anyway? Anyways, here are some I disable and how I disable them. Read More >>
OK, I promised a friend some time ago that I’d post all of my post-install procedures and I’ve not quite followed through with that so I’m doing a few before finishing up my three part post on the “Home Hacker’s Network”. These are all just little hacks I’ve come across and modified to suit my needs. I like this one a bunch as it gives me a nice shell prompt when I login as well as when I use screen (although the gnu screen configuration part is mutually exclusive to the shell modification part).
So lets get started… Read More >>
On a headless server that you have at home or for testing I like to make sure that all security updates and trivial updates are done automatically. A good sys admin will shy away from this practice for a good reason, updates can mess things up. In a production environment or where the server setup is very complex I can understand the need to manually run updates. For me, well I’m lazy when it comes to my home machines and generally don’t have too complex of setups. Also, in my experience, I’ve hardly ever seen an apt security or trivial update cause any harm (desktop linux I have seen issues though). That being said, I like to force security and trivial updates to happen daily. Read More >>
In my last post I discussed pros and cons of setting up a managed switch between your firewall and the Internet. Here I will finish the rest of the switch configuration. Read More >>
