SysAdmin's Journey

Book Review: Drupal 6 Site Blueprints

Justin Ellison — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:22:53 +0000

Title:

Drupal 6 Site Blueprints

ISBN:

9781847199041

Author:

Timi Ogunjobi

Buy the book

Sample Chapter Download:

Chapter 12

Drupal 6 Site Blueprints is a pretty quick read, coming in at just under 250 pages. The book is good - I personally got a lot out of this book, but I think I fit into this book's relatively small target audience (advanced Drupal newbie). The title chosen for the book is perfect. The author didn't use the word "recipe", or "cookbook", he used "blueprints". When you have a recipe, you get a list of ingredients as well as some very specific instructions on how to combine them all together. It tells you everything you need to

CheckPoint UTM-1 vs Cisco ASA in an ECommerce Setting

Justin Ellison — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:22:53 +0000

Recently at $WORK, we had to come up with budget proposals for next year. We knew that we were going to outgrow our current Checkpoint UTM appliances by holiday next year, so we had to buy new hardware. We just had to decide which hardware. While I'm capable of building a Linux/*BSD firewall on my own, I frankly don't have the time to mess around with updates and compliance documentation. We need an appliance, and for our needs, Cisco and CheckPoint are about the only options for us. We switched to the UTM appliances from a pair of Cisco ASA 5500's a few years ago. However, after examining the pros and cons of both, I recommended we switch back to the ASA platform next year. Read on for my decision making process explained.

New in Solaris 10 Update 8 - ZFS Support in Flash Archives

Justin Ellison — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:08:46 +0000

The release of Solaris 10 10/09 (Update 8) has come and gone, and without too much fanfare from my point of view. In my opinion, there is one new feature that will really help propel root ZFS installations into the enterprises where there was resistance before. You see, many larger corporations have invested a lot of time and money into using Flash Archive coupled with Jumpstart to be able to deploy golden images to many machines in a small amount of time. However, up until now, ZFS and Flash Archive were incompatible, meaning you were forced to use UFS root file systems if you wanted to use Flash Archive installs. Some have even went to great lengths to hack solutions together, but I doubt they made many in-roads into the enterprise. Read on for a quick overview of Flash Archive and ZFS support in the latest update of Solaris 10.

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Three - The Scripts

Justin Ellison — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:24:51 +0000

In part three of the series, we ended with a working Custom Jumpstart setup, but you most certainly will be left wanting to do more. That's where the begin and finish scripts come into play -- anything you can do via /bin/sh you can do via Jumpstart. Up until now, the series has been more of a "Typical Jumpstart" tutorial -- this post is where this series of posts earns it's name. Read more for about 200 lines of shell-scripting goodness.

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Three - The Jumpstart Profile

Justin Ellison — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:16:14 +0000

In part two of the series, we left off with a non-working Custom Jumpstart setup. By creating our Jumpstart profile file and a sysidcfg file, we'll have a basic, but working Custom Jumpstart. The profile contains settings specific to the installation, where the sysidcfg file contains settings specific to the machine during and after installation.

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Two

Justin Ellison — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:30:55 +0000

In part one of the series, we setup the ISC DHCP server. Now it's time to set up our install and config servers -- both of which will reside on the same box in this case. Solaris Jumpstart uses standard protocols, namely TFTP and NFS to provide these services. In this post, we'll just be setting up the framework for the real customizations that will come in parts three and four.

Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part One

Justin Ellison — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:48:08 +0000

Only in my world do you get a RHCE one week, and then come back and work on nothing but Solaris Jumpstart for the next couple of weeks! Oh well, it's always good as long as you're learning. What started out as a simple upgrade from Apache 2.0 to 2.2 quickly turned into re-provisioning our web tier. We could have upgraded, but there ended up being so many dependencies needed I decided that it would be easier to just start fresh with Solaris 10u7 on all our webservers. Since I knew that I'd be doing this to all our webservers, it made sense to spend the time up-front on setup up a completely automated installation. This time spent on the front-end should save a huge amount of time on the back side when it comes to troubleshooting. In my case, I learned a lot of undocumented tips and tricks, and stumbled across a few "gotchas" as well. After going through an exercise like this, I now know what Puppet is for, and ordered my first book. I'll give a review once I'm done.

First of all, we already have an ISC DHCPd server running to provide Red Hat Kickstart installs, so I decided to leverage that. Sun's DHCPd works fine, but it's a completely different beast when it comes to configuration.

Part one of the series covers setting up your dhcpd.conf.

Random Password Generation in a Perl One-Liner

Justin Ellison — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:43:39 +0000

Say you need a quick random 8 character alpha-numeric password. In sh, there isn't a $RANDOM variable and tr can give different results on different OS's. More than likely you have perl available - use it!

perl -le 'print map { (a..z,A..Z,0..9)[rand 62] } 0..pop' 8

Thanks to Chris Angell's Perl One-Liner page for this one. Do you have a better cross-platform way of doing it? Let me know!

Apache 2.2.12 - 2.2.13 and Solaris 10 Bug Nastiness

Justin Ellison — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:55:03 +0000

At work, I've been working on an upgrade from a custom-compiled version of Apache 2.0.x to the Sun-provided Glassfish Webstack 1.5. I spent about a week troubleshooting what I thought was configuration issue, only to finally find it's a bug way upstream in Apache 2.2.12+. This bug only affects Solaris 10, and is near-impossible to reproduce. If you use Solaris 10 and Apache, read on so you don't waste a week of your life like I did.

SCSA vs RHCE

Justin Ellison — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:48:25 +0000

After taking and passing both my SCSA and my RHCE exams this year, it's time to reflect. Read on for the pros and cons of each from a student's point of view.