Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Puppet and per-domain configuration

Friday, March 30th, 2007

I started deploying puppet at work, after installing it a couple of weeks ago and playing with it. I've got it doing some pretty basic management so far: SSH key management Timezone and Locale NTP Minimum required packages /etc/resolv.conf None of this is overly complicated, but it is very useful for me. SSH key management This is actually ...

mp3gain

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

I had a couple of albums of mp3s that were encoded with really low gain. Rather than re-encode the mp3s (which wouldn't have taken too long), I had a look for tools that would let me normalise these tools. I didn't have a lot of luck, and then yesterday I ...

Linux QOS and monitoring

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

I implemented QOS for inter-office phone calls for a client today using tc and diffserv. The phones and phone systems were configured by the supplier to set "Diffserv 46", as their technician called it, which is also known as the EF PHB, or Expedited Forwarding Per-Hop Behaviour. This was made ...

XenSource release Xen Server, Xen Express

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

XenSource have announced a couple of new commercial offerings to go along with their Xen Enterprise release. While Xen itself is opensource, XenSource have decided to make commercial packages offering a GUI management console, more advanced management APIs, and perhaps most importantly, PV drivers for Windows guests. The full suite ...

XenSource University

Friday, December 8th, 2006

Work has finally calmed down enough that I'm able to write a post about this. Last week I flew up to San Jose to attend the first XenSource University.  This was a two day event, the first of which had a series of business and technical presentation from XenSource and ...

Mailserver upgrades

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

I have been upgrading our MTA infrastructure at work from qmail and vpopmail, to a more robust system built using exim4, cyrus, and openldap for authentication and configuration data. I've been running a similar setup for ages on meta.net.nz, so I took the opportunity to do some work on ...