Life Support!

Wow! A whole 2.75 months and nothing new on techslaves… things are getting boring around here!

I’ve been itching to make some new posts but work has picked up lately. I’m working on a new project I started as a collaboration with a large IT group here on campus. There is lots of exciting stuff going on with the project and when it’s all said and done, I’m going to share valuable things I learned along the way.

Just to force myself to finally write about it, I’m going to list the vague project key points and then I’ll just have no choice but to follow up or let everyone (read: myself) down:

• Setup OpenLDAP w/ TLS, syncrepl, LAM
• Migrate existing NIS directory to LDAP
• NFS and Samba (security = user) migration to High Availability w/ Heartbeat/Pacemaker/DRBD
• iSCSI SAN storage w/ multipath and HBAs
• Large data consolidation (4TB+) from multiple sources
• Support Windows XP,Vista,7 and Ubuntu 8,9,10 and Centos 4,5 clients w/ automount in LDAP on all Linux clients.

We’re targeting an end date of August 31st, wish me luck. Beans will be spilled!

Next project down the line might be back with my group going one-up on this configuration by implementing FreeIPA v2 for it’s slick Kerberos, HBAC and (hopefully) sudo policy integration. FreeIPA does raise some new questions but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Stay hungry, techslaves.

Books24x7: Not Impressed

That’s right, you read it correctly: I’m not impressed with Books24x7.

It’s not their collection (plenty of stuff for various fields of interest) and it’s not their price (I’m using it under a campus subscription so what’s to complain about?). It’s their interface.

Could it be anymore annoying to read a book than the Books24x7 experience? Was this website designed in the 90s?

What frustrates me the most is that you cannot usefully navigate/read a book on Books24x7 without the use of a mouse. Sure, I can use Spacebar, the arrow keys or Page Up/Page Down to navigate on a single page, but because each “page” is just a small chunk of text, you need to constantly be clicking the “Next” link. Tab key link navigation, you say? There are so many links at the top of the page that tabbing through all of them to reach the “Next” link takes longer than grabbing for the mouse.

This is just a terrible book reading experience. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled by… I dunno? PDF files and Preview.app or Stanza? I want to read some of these books but Books24x7 just makes it so unpleasant that I’d rather just find the hardcopies at the library or pay for a decent ebook version that I can read on whatever device or with whatever software that might actually be designed with some thought regarding the reading experience.

Cfengine 3 Snippets Part 1: DenyHosts

I’ve recently begun looking into configuration management with cfengine 3. I’ve ignored this growing sub-field of system administration for too long and I just can’t ignore it anymore. After spending quite some time researching the philosophies, methods and different tools out there, I settled on starting out with cfengine 3. There’s no special reason that I chose cfengine instead of puppet, bcfg2, chef or AutomateIT. I haven’t used any of these tools and thus I cannot pass judgement on them or their methods. All these projects seem to have intelligent and highly motivated people behind them. I simply gravitated towards cfengine because of its strong academic background and the fact that version 3 now represents the most recent and modern research in the field by Mark Burgess et. al.

As part of my learning experience with cfengine, I’ve decided to start posting some of the code that I’ve begun developing in the hopes that by writing about it, I can learn better, faster and maybe even receive some helpful comments from readers along the way. Beware, I’m a cfengine newbie and so what I post here should NOT be copy and pasted into your environment unless you’re ok with the potential of wildly breaking things!

The first snippet of code I want to discuss is related to managing our DenyHosts configuration. As part of our “security policy”, I would like to ensure that every RedHat/CentOS system is running a properly configured DenyHosts instance. Here is what I’ve come up with so far.

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RHEL/CentOS, NFS and Firewalls

I recently decided that it’s about time to setup consistent, explicit and tight firewall policy across our Linux (mostly RHEL/CentOS) servers. One of the initial issues I faced was NFS. NFS implementations are very well known to make use of the portmapper and dynamically assigned port for rpc.mountd and because of this dynamic assignment, firewalling NFS can be challenging.

Luckily, RedHat’s /etc/sysconfig/nfs configuration file read by  various “nfs”, “nfslock” and RPC services init scripts provides an easy means of locking down specific ports for all the NFS-related services so that one doesn’t have to work around the dynamic port assignment problem when it comes to firewalling.

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Atempo Time Navigator 4.2 Archive Media Selection Tunable

Just a quick post here to share a non-obvious tunable for Atempo’s Time Navigator 4.2 regarding archiving and media selection.

Before upgrading from 4.1 to 4.2 Time Navigator’s media selection for archive jobs with standalone drives behaved as expected: If existing partly filled and open cartridges in the associated media pool existed, Time Navigator would request those media be placed in the drives upon the start a new archive operation, effectively only asking for new, unlabeled media to be inserted once the existing media was full.

However, with the upgrade to 4.2 we found that Time Navigator was no longer requesting the existing, partly filled, open cartridges and was instead requesting new, unlabeled media to be inserted into the drives instead! The result of this new behavior was that Time Navigator would use new tapes for every new archive operation, no matter if existing, partly filled and open media was available in the media pool. Basically 4.2′s default behavior was preventing us from filling any archive media unless the particular archive job would happen to be larger than a single tape.

While I don’t know why the functionality changed, I do know what tunable to modify in order to make 4.2 behave like 4.1. The tunable is “check_external_cart_when_recycling“. Setting this tunable to “Yes” has restored the 4.1 behavior, allowing us to make full use of all archive media capacity by only requesting new media when all the existing media in the media pool has been filled.

I believe we only faced this problem because we use standalone archive tape drives that do not have an autoloader or robot nor an “inventory” of online tape. Each tape must be manually loaded. I suspect that if we had an autoloader for our tape drives, that 4.2 would have made the correct/expected selection of media.

I doubt that anyone else is going to face this problem but it took about 3 weeks with Atempo’s R&D department to figure out the problem so I figure if posting here can save anyone that amount of time, then I’ll have done my part!