puppet at home

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Ryan

After talking with a coworker today, I decided that I would go ahead and use puppet on my netbook. I don’t constantly distrohop, but when I do, it would be nice to have puppet automatically install all the packages I use commonly for me. Today, I installed puppet and did a quick ownership change to start on my Ubuntu 10.10 UNR install:

edit /etc/hosts with a cname puppet to localhost:
127.0.0.1 localhost puppet

Install the packages:

sudo apt-get install puppet puppetmaster
sudo chown puppet:puppet /var/lib/puppet

Put the following code at /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp


# site.pp
file { "/etc/sudoers":
owner => root, group => root, mode => 440
}

Test run:
puppetd --test

This will make sure that the sudoers file is 440 and owned specifically by the right group. You can change the group to be puppet for fun and run the puppetd –test to see it change it right before your eyes!

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Opensolaris fork announcement on August 3rd called Illumos?

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Ryan

Check out the website of Illumos at http://www.illumos.org/

They are making an announcement on August 3rd in New York 1PM EDT and I’m wondering if it’ll be a fork of the OpenSolaris project. This would be great because of how slow the OpenSolaris releases were coming out. Hopefully we’ll have an exciting announcement other than just “we are forking OpenSolaris”. News about the announcement be will on the illumos wiki.

Here are some things I would like to see if they do fork:

  1. Desktop, server, and “home file server” editions.
  2. ZFS version updated to the release with deduplication.
  3. New and improved package manager.
  4. Easy community involvement with a rockstar community manager.
  5. Package installations from the website.
  6. Support service plans.
  7. Public road map.

that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Obviously, almost all of these will probably not happen but one can dream ;) .

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HTC G1 android phone

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Ryan

I managed to get a HTC G1 android phone with version1.6 recently. Although people dog on this version, it actually is really nice. I am waiting for Cyanogen to come out with a stable version of CM6 which is based on 2.2 Froyo on to this G1.  Then this thing will be a monster!

Here are the applications I’ve put on it:

  1. Aldiko
  2. android VNC
  3. ConnectBot
  4. doubleTwist
  5. Gesture Search
  6. Google Goggles
  7. K-9 Mail
  8. Google Listen
  9. Mint.com
  10. mustard
  11. Remote RDP Lite
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Benefits of StringBuffer and StringBuilder in java

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Ryan

The StringBuffer class since java 1.0 should be replaced with the newer StringBuilder class in java 1.5 if you don’t need any synchronization. What I learned in college about StringBuffer which probably is the same with StringBuilder is that it is a lot more efficient when concatenating Strings.

For example,

String temp = “yo”;

yo += ” yo”;

Now you would think it would just append the second ” yo” to the end of temp, but what happens is that a new string is created and then everything is copied into it. This gets messy if you put the yo += “yo”; in a loop.

For StringBuilder and StringBuffer, it will just append the ” yo” to the StringBuilder object in a faster and space efficient setting. If you hit the end of the size of the StringBuilder, it’ll just increase the size automatically.

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capi_get_sensors() failed, status = -1

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Ryan

I got this on the alom interface to a Oracle Sun SPARC 5120 when trying to do the showenvironment command:

capi_get_sensors() failed, status = -1

Haven’t figured out the problem yet.

Posted in broken and fixed | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Impressions of Picross 3d so far

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Ryan

picross 3d

So far, this game is really fun. I’m only on level 5 in easy section and I’m enjoying it. Unlike the previous game, you use a hammer to break out blocks to get the 3d shape of the object we are finding. It passes the time very fast and it’s not as frustrating yet so I may change my tune when I get into the medium/hard section of this game. Thumbs up so far though.

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Mini review of the Dell ST2410 Monitor

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Ryan

Dell ST2410 Monitor

Pros:

  1. HDMI, vga, and DVI ports.
  2. 1080p resolution
  3. $189 when I purchased it.
  4. Audio in and audio out plug.
  5. If you connect a device, like a PS3 to the hdmi port and tell it pass audio through, it will go out the audio out plug. So I have a set of computer speakers connected with the standard 35mm jack into the Audio out plug on the monitor and a 35mm cable from my computer to the audio in. When I’m in vga mode it will take the audio from my computer, but when I move it to the hdmi mode, it gets the audio from the PS3 through my computer speakers! Total win!
  6. Works fine in Ubuntu through the VGA port at 1080p resolution. Not sure why but the DVI only worked on the Windows 7 box.

Cons:

  1. Doesn’t come with a height adjustable stand.
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lbcd stuck in stat D state wchan sync_p

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Ryan

== update ==
We ended up just upgrading them to 5.5 when it came out and so far it hasn’t happened again.
== end update ==

So I’m having a weird situation with our Centos 5.4 AMD boxes that are open for general use. Occassional, the lbcd process will go into a D state and just chew up cpu doing absolutely nothing. With lbcd stopped basically, users can’t use the load balanced name to get into this machine. Kill -9 does nothing and strace shows absolutely nothing. lbcd can’t restart at all. Heres an output from one box:

ps axl | grep D
F   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI    VSZ   RSS WCHAN  STAT TTY        TIME COMMAND
1     0  2397     1  16   0   1672     8 sync_p D    ?          2:07 /pkg/lbcd/current/sbin/lbcd

So far it doesn’t affect the Intel machines we have, but that could be because regular users can’t log into them. If I find the reason, I’ll be sure to post it up here.

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Bluearc Titan cifs add export

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Ryan

Here are a few steps on the command line to add a cifs export on a non-clustered BlueArc Titan from the Linux SMU:

pssc -u supervisor -F pwfile -e 1 192.0.2.2 cifs-share add ryan filesystem \\path\\to\\share\\ryan

This works great if you got a list of users and their cifs share names. The nice thing on our NetApp FAS940 was that there was cifs_homedir.cfg where you can edit the locations of where the cifs home directories would be exported on and it would automatically do it to any of the folders in it.

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Funny process kill with strace

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Ryan

Found out a weird thing where my process would hang when I tried to do a df and one of the nfs mounts would just hang there on our CentOS 5 machines.

I found that if I killed the process straight up, nothing would happen. But if I killed the pid like so:

kill 3560

And then do a strace on it:

strace -p 3560

It would end up killing the process for me!

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