My odometer read this as I pulled into my driveway at home tonight. No joke. There really is no place like localhost home.

Hopefully Apple doesn’t make up some way to disable this in the future, but it seems that despite claims elsewhere on the web, the latest Airport Extreme can be used with a USB hard drive to perform Time Machine backups. I’ve always heard great things about the Airport devices and really wanted to do backups over it, but I already had a larger USB hard drive, so a Time Capsule seemed like a bit of a waste. This worked with an Airport Extreme 802.11n 5th generation. My Macs are both Lion and Snow Leopard.

All you have to do is first plug the hard drive directory into your Mac, partition as desired and format filesystems as an HFS (Mac OS Extended). Then, plugin the drive and enable disk sharing on the Airport. After that’s done, your Aiport should show up in Finder. Once you mount it, you can select it from the Time Machine settings (it will appear as a Time Capsule).

That’s it! Glad I found out and wasn’t deterred by what Apple says and is on their forums. The Airport has been amazing, video streaming is far smoother now unlike with the aging wireless router I was replacing. Definitely a recommended buy!

Every 6 months when Ubuntu releases I throw caution to the wind, click the upgrade button on my desktop, and leave, expecting to come back shortly to an awesome new operating system. And every 6 months it seems I don’t come back to something awesome, but to a whole collection of new problems. Usually it’s a whole collection of conflicts or broken packages. Sometimes the system won’t boot. Sometimes X won’t start or some weird new graphics problem pops up. It pretty much always leads to a fresh install. This time, however, things were different. With 11.10, things went smoothly and everything came back up nicely. That is until I logged in and realized all my GNOME settings were non-existent afte the upgrade to GNOME 3.

I don’t really have any particular loyalties or love of GNOME, I just used it because that was the default and tends to be the one that’s been polished the most by Ubuntu. While the new desktop looks great, it seems to have gone backwards quite a bit in usability. The integrations with Banshee/volume controls seem to be gone (or at least not working after my upgrade), menus are confusing and way too click-heavy, and there seems to be almost not configurability to the desktop. Even the new gnome-tweak-tool seems to have very little customizability. It seems over half of the customizations have to do with fonts and really small things that don’t matter to me at all. There are those who are passionate about fonts, but I am not one of those people.

Perhaps worse, there’s a new menu item under your username on the menu bar for “Online Accounts”. When I clicked on it, it brought me to a screen asking to give access to my Google account.. I thought maybe this could have some promise, so I granted it access to my Goolge account and it said that it had access to, among other things, docs (which I thought was going to be really awesome). However, nothing really indicated any next steps for accessing things. After poking around a bit and not finding anything, I did a quick search online to see if anyone could give any indication for what this thing was supposed to do. And, as it seems.. It does nothing. While I do enjoy a good technology preview.. I had to remind myself that this was an actual release. Ugh. I just granted access to my Google account for.. what?

One pleasant detail that I did thoroughly enjoy about the new GNOME is the OSX-style alt-tab/alt-~ app/window switching. Grouping applications and switching windows within the apps that way has been something that I’ve desired for a long time when switching back and forth. I know that most will probably hate it, but I’m a fan

This post is mostly for my own record as I keep having to look at my shell history every time I want to spin up a new virtual machine on my KVM server at home (so for those looking for something earth shattering, move along). For anyone looking for a how-to to get started, I followed an entry over a howtoforge. It’s pretty good, so no need to replicate.

Now, the goods.

If this is your first image, I recommend looking for the section in the page referenced titled “3 Creating An Image-Based VM” (seems no way to link to specific sections..). For me, I just copy one of the dirs from an existing one and clear out the ubuntu-kvm dir and edit vmbuilder.partition as necessary.

Then, from that dir, run:
sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite=natty --flavour=virtual --arch=amd64 -o --libvirt=qemu:///system --ip=172.16.0.10 --templates=mytemplates --user=wyatt --name=Wyatt --pass=supersecret --addpkg=vim-nox --addpkg=unattended-upgrades --addpkg=acpid --addpkg=openssh-server --firstboot=/home/user/host.whatan00b.com/boot.sh --mem=1024 --hostname=host.whatan00b.com --bridge=br0 --part=vmbuilder.partition

Then, start the vm:
sudo virsh start host.whatan00b.com

It should boot shortly and you can ssh to the shiny new vm with the IP and username/password specified. Hopefully soon I can find some fancy way to integrate Puppet into the mix.

I’m here at PuppetConf in Portland and one of the speakers got me all excited again about Vagrant. I’ve played around with Vagrant before, but he was showing off some awesome features that I didn’t realize existed which made me want to play with the tool again (more on that later!). Anyway, I updated all the versions of things Vagrant-related and tried to use it again. However, when I downloaded one of the default images from the getting started page I was greeted with an awesomely descriptive error:

[default] Importing base box 'lucid32'...
The VM import failed! Try running `VBoxManage import` on the box file
manually for more verbose error output.

Running it with VBoxManage as instructed gave a slightly-better-yet-not-so-useful error:
VBoxManage: error: Appliance file must have .ovf extension
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80bb0004), component Appliance, interface IAppliance, callee nsISupports
Context: "Read(Bstr(pszAbsFilePath).raw(), progressRead.asOutParam())" at line 302 of file VBoxManageAppliance.cpp

A few Google searches for this error got me almost nowhere except that it was likely a VirtualBox configuration issue. Great. After digging around for far too long, I figured out that it was because when I had played with Vagrant/VirtualBox in the past I had configured VirtualBox’s default machine folder to an external drive that I didn’t have plugged in! Doh. Anyway, was a pretty easy fix but I thought I’d share if it saved someone some time. The default machine folder is set on the first screen in the VirtualBox preferences window (at least for me on my Mac).

I think from now on I’ll give all my machines names based on buzzwords. It makes for some awesome error / status messages. Today’s message from Spotlight after upgrading to OS X Lion definitely didn’t let me down. I had to share.

The cloud is a big place..

As an aside.. be sure to give plenty of time after the upgrade is finished for Spotlight to index things again. While my laptop isn’t unusable, it slows things down quite a bit.

I have been struggling with an issue for a bit while trying to get tab completion working on the python shell on OS X. I’ve been working on a Django project and not being able to tab complete has been a bit obnoxious. It took a few sessions of searching around to find out what’s going on, so I thought I’d share it in one place. Turns out that the default shell settings are ready to go with tab complete (I spent a lot of time making sure configs were correct), but OS X simply doesn’t ship GNU readline. Instead, Apple just symlinked BSD libedit which is problematic because the default python readline module links to GNU readline.

Someone has already created an egg with readline statically linked just for OS X so the fix is super-easy. Just install the standalone readline module with your favorite python installer. I used:
sudo easy_install readline

After delaying cleanup on the code for a week or two, I’ve published my cookbook for deploying SugarCRM CE using Opscode Chef. The cookbook utilizes the community cookbooks from Opscode for deploying the standard LAMP stack on a machine, grabs a copy of the latest stable build of SugarCRM CE from Github, and creates a silent installer file for super-easy installation of SugarCRM.

Some quick notes on setup:

Usage

Usage is super easy, especially with a general knowledge of Chef. I’m not going to dive into setting up Chef, they’ve got some great documentation for that.

You’ll need to pull down the php, apache2, mysql, openssl, and git community cookbooks from Opscode and upload to your organization as well.

Then, you can just download the sugarcrm cookbook and upload to your organization:
knife cookbook site vendor sugarcrm
knife cookbook upload sugarcrm

Then, add the sugarcrm recipe to whatever node or role you desire. For me, I created a role for sugarcrm:
$ knife role show sugarcrmchef_type: role
default_attributes:
description:
env_run_lists:
json_class: Chef::Role
name: sugarcrm
override_attributes:
run_list: recipe[sugarcrm]

You can either bootstrap a new VM / cloud instance or apply the role to an existing machine and do a run of chef-client.

For my example, I created a new EC2 instance based on Ubuntu (can be any OS that the Opscode community cookbooks support):
knife ec2 server create -r 'role[sugarcrm]' --image ami-7000f019 -d ubuntu10.04-apt -S mykey -x ubuntu -i ~/.ssh/mykey.pem

Then, you can navigate to your server’s FQDN/sugarcrm in your browser to complete the install. Not to worry, the cookbook configures a config_si.php (si = silent installer), so no need to know any details about your install.

Once complete, you’ll reach the login page. Default login is admin/admin (which can be overridden with override attributes in the role/node).

That’s it!

For anyone who knows SuSE Enterprise, you can file this one under “what a n00b!” (my SuSE experience in the past has been with openSUSE), but I recently inherited a project that required RHEL or SuSE Enterprise so they chose to deploy SuSE Enterprise on EC2 to reduce acquisition time. (Who would’ve thought a cloud provider like Amazon would be faster to acquire an install of one of these softwares that used more traditional licensing models?) Anyway, I needed to install a few extra pieces of software, but when I ran yast, its list of repositories was empty!? Turns out the fix is really easy, but I couldn’t easily find the answer within a minute or two, so I thought I’d share:

suse_register -a email="myemail@whatan00b.com"

Yup, that was it. No license key required (at least on the EC2 build). Novell just wanted my email address.

Upgraded my Zimbra system from 6.0.9 (haven’t kept up-to-date with the 6.0.x series) to 7.0 tonight. The upgrade was pretty straightforward (though a couple of weird things happened). Just have to install sqlite3 as an added prerequisite on my platform (Ubuntu 10.04 x64):
apt-get install sqlite3

At the end of the upgrade, it the upgrader complained a bit about finding my license file. I have a valid license, and I just hit enter to go past the message and it wasn’t an issue after that…
Looking for valid license to install...failed to install license.
*******ERROR
Failed to install a license - this will prevent your server from functioning properly
Please contact Zimbra to obtain a license
Press RETURN to continue Activating license...license activated.

One more note. Once again, I lost my MTA and zimbraMailMode settings.

I haven’t had time yet to play with the new fanciness, but the geek inside me didn’t allow me to let a major upgrade sit for too long. So far I’m at least digging the new UI.