taiter.com - blog index

Alright, well I have put all the posts back up for now and they should stay there. I'll be redesigning when I have some time, but at least all the material is available again!

- Tait

Recently my Shuttle HTPC started having issues when booting into Gnome using any sort of hardware video acceleration. I would turn it on and watch it boot until it got to the login screen, at this point it would either let me login and then power off or just power off before it got to the graphical login screen.

I decided to pick up a new video card with HDMI so I wouldn't have to switch my speaker input to direct each time I wanted to use my PC. I grabbed the EVGA GeForce 210 from Tiger Direct and after some power setting changes in the BIOS, the computer booted and automatically started using the newly plugged in HDMI cable!

Now all I had to do was get the sound working.

Hi Everyone,

I apologize for any inconvenience, but it appears that my old installation was infected and thus ended up with my server being blocked. I have to redo everything so it will take some time so please be patient!

Tait

Another tiny little update here.

Some may notice that I now have some new snazzy logos on my blog. This is because a couple of weeks ago I became a Cisco Certified Network Associate!

It was a lot of fun but I can give you a few tips:

1. If you have never played with Cisco equipment before, try and pick some up on eBay for dirt cheap

2. If you know what Cisco gear looks like and have played with some a little bit, I highly suggest checking out GNS (Graphical Network Simulator) to create the network scenarios you will need to practice for the CCNA.

EDIT: You will need IOS images for GNS and therefore a valid Cisco support contract to download them!

3. Check out the CBT Nuggets CCNA videos, they are amazing! The trainer who does the videos presents everything in a very easy and understandable way.

4. Take the two exam route (ICND1 and ICND2) instead of the CCNA Composite exam. This will allow you to take the exams at two different times and gives you more time per exam.

5. Grab the Cisco Press books for ICND1 and ICND2 as well, they provide some info that may not be covered in entirety in the CBT Nuggets videos.

Finally, just have fun with it. There is a lot of info to cover for people new to Cisco so take your time and make sure you are comfortable in your labs with setting up the routing and switching protocols. Also make sure you know and understand how to subnet quickly! (The method taught in the CBT Nuggets videos is by far the easiest and fastest way).

I am moving on to the CCNP track, a lot more work but it is going to be a lot of fun (unless through doing this I shun the internet and rid my life of all technology).

Leave a comment if you have passed your CCNA or if you are going for it and want some more tips. I will not be giving out test examples!

This is in addition to my previous entry regarding setting up postfix to relay messages through an SMTP server that requires authentication.

A very simple change is needed here, just ensure that yum-updatesd has been installed and is set to run at boot.

Also, I wanted to change the length of time between notifications from hourly to daily to stop a flood of emails to my inbox.

All we need to do is edit the /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf file and do the following:

Edit run_interval = to show the following:

# how often to check for new updates (in seconds)
# 86400 is 24 hours in seconds
run_interval = 86400

Now change the emit_via = line to read

emit_via = email

Add a new parameter for the email address to send to

email_to = you@youremail.com

You can also change the above line to send to the root user, if you followed my previous post the alias will already be setup and you will get them that way.
And that should be it! You will be notified via email about any new packages to install.

Last night I decided that I wanted to make my home server able to send out Logwatch and yum-updatesd emails to my work email so I can keep on top of updates and changes to my system.

Since I have been testing with Postfix lately I have found that it is much easier to configure than sendmail so I installed postfix, removed sendmail and made sure that postfix was my default mailer. If you don't know how to do this, do some google searching for switching to postfix in your distro.

As Rogers will surely freak out if I started running a local SMTP/IMAP server due to their Terms and Conditions, I decided to use an existing email service that I have through godaddy.com and figure out how to get postfix to authenticate to the SMTP server that I use there. This means it will also work if your ISP gives you an email address that uses SMTP to send but has a username and password.

Before starting this you need the following information from your SMTP server or ISP:

- User name
- SMTP Server address
- SMTP Server port (if it is something other than the default port, 25)

You will also need:

- Root access
- Postfix installed and set as the default mailer

Some of you may have noticed that in Fedora 12 there is no more GUI interface to the PolicyKit.

Since I fire up virt-manager quite a few times during the day to bring up/down virtual machines for testing I wanted to avoid having to constantly put in my root password to do anything.

After some poking around in the documentation for the new version of PolicyKit, I was able to get virt-manager to trust my username when using virt-manager.

Recently I set up Openfire as a corporate messaging service, if you haven't heard about Openfire I highly suggest checking it out. It can be forced to be SSL encrypted and allows you to tie into Active Directory to pull users and information. I might be writing an entry soon regarding adding specific users and groups to Openfire from Active Directory and populating the "Vcards" with information from Active Directory.

The problem I ran into was that since our VPN server and Openfire server both have external access and are in the same address space, the VPN server would try to send the Openfire traffic out the external gateway but couldn't reach the server because of some ACLs that were set in place.

So what I did was take the traffic from the VPN tunnel that is going to the Openfire ports and route it through our internal network.

Recently I purchased an SSD (OCZ Agility 60GB) to put into my Asus EEEPC-1000HE and wanted to migrate everything from my default 160GB drive to the new SSD. This required resizing of the LVM prior to copying the partitions across to the SSD.

It is also very important that your logical volumes you wish to resize and migrate aren't filled with more data than the destination drive will hold!

For example my root LV (called lv_root) had 9GB in use so it was alright for me to resize and transfer to the new system.

Also, you will probably need to remove your swap LV (if your swap is configured as an LV), there will be an example of how to do that.

Required Items:

• USB Drive or Blank CDROM
  
• liveusb-creator (if using USB method)
  
• (Optional)Fedora LiveCD Iso
• You can also get liveusb-creator to download the image over the internet
• USB SATA II connector or secondary SATA port on your motherboard
  

Now you can create the LiveUSB or LiveCD of Fedora. Do this now!

Have all the above items? Lets get started.

Today I realized that trying there is a much easier way to create custom updated paravirtualized domUs that can be rolled out in a matter of minutes than copying a 20GB image file from an NFS mount.

With kickstart it is really a no brainer; from the config file you can set absolutely everything for your domU... eg. IP, hostname and many more options (way too many to list here, but if you want you can check out the kickstart manual, there is a link provided at the end of the howto).

I will be providing a basic kickstart install script that installs a few extra packages and then updates the entire installation.