So it got to that time of the year where I feel the itch to upgrade my aging home server. I assessed the situation and realized that, for what it does, my current server does not need any kind of hardware upgrade. So I just decided to rebuild it with Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit and change up the server software a bit to be more accessible to my wife as well as to be a bit more modern (torrentflux and derivatives have been dead for a while now).
« Posts under Linux
Big-IP: Custom IIS SOAP Monitor
In working on a production issue with my company’s flagship SaaS product I worked with some of the brilliant F5 engineers to isolate one web server in the load balanced pool which was intermittently failing. The F5 engineer recommended a health monitor that does more than just poll for a static page. He suggested we implement some kind of soap call to make the application pool do some work and return a result (I guess in case the IIS application pool is misbehaving but not down). So I worked with one of our developers to do just that but ran into some caveats which required yet another custom health monitor.
Big-IP: Sharepoint 2010 Monitor
While specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.
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Yum – List Only Security Updates
I’ve been really MS inundated at work lately with exchange 2010, UAG 2010, and Communicator deployments/migrations. So to balance my life a bit I better do a quick post of a linux hack 
Here is a quick one I tacked together about 6 months ago. This will generate a detailed report of all the security updates you are missing with a description of what the update will fix. You will need the yum-security package installed for this to work.
yum list-security | awk 'NR!=1 {print $1}' | sed '/list-security/d' | xargs yum info-security > security_report.txt
ESX 4.0: Post-Install Script
Sure there are better ways to mass deploy ESX servers, but this way will save the one off farm deployment person some time I took liberties in assuming you would be able to fill in the blanks for variables so <VARIABLE> or _VARIABLE_ will need to be replaced ad-lib style. Just for you my friend, served up proper on a hyper-link plate….. esx4_postinstall
BIG-IP: Load Balancer Upgrade
I had the pleasure of doing an F5 BIG-IP load balancer upgrade recently and am happy with the way the F5 people have designed their systems for fail over. Essentially you will use different system partitions to host different versions of their product and you change which one you want to boot to after updating the inactive partition. This, theoretically, means you can always go back to a working configuration if something goes awry. I’m unhappy with how fragmented their documentation is in getting from point A to point B though. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do…
IPblock on Headless Ubuntu 9.04 Server
It was about time for me to upgrade my aging home Linux server and reinstall torrentflux-b4t with ipblock (among other things). I went back to my old post on what I did previously and found everything to be similar but slightly off. To do this reconfiguration and make ipblock work without the java user interface I had to tweak things a bit and compile another deb package. Below is how I recall doing this.
CentOS/Redhat 5.x Post-Install Script
I whipped up a post install script to run on our new linux servers that drastically reduced the amount of manual effort involved with post-deployment configuration. I’m sure this could some how be integrated into the kick deployment. In any case, this script helps setup your sudo users, snmp services, and some other basic things. Modify to your environment and run directly after deployment on your headless linux servers. Save the script and change to .sh and run with sh ./centos-postinsatll.sh at a command prompt. Cheers!
CentOS/Redhat 5.x Kickstart Deployment
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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GNS3 on Ubuntu 8.04 – Migrating Your Install
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.