Category: Open Source Software

Packt Publishing has sent me a copy of Instant Chef Starter, by John Ewart to review. I should have this review up within the week. This is a great opportunity as one of the most important tools that any system administrator can learn is configuration management, and Chef is a leader in that space. Chef…

I have had to setup Apache to proxy splunk several times over the past 6 months and keep forgetting the splunk configuration to make this work. Be sure to set the following in /opt/splunk/etc/system/local/web.conf: enableSplunkWebSSL = 0 root_endpoint = /splunk tools.proxy.on = True This assumes a proxy configuration of the following for apache 2.2: ProxyPass…

I recently made a mistake and committed an ISO file to git that was 2GB in size. I did not immediately notice this issue and made several local commits without a push to github working properly. I did some research and figured out how to fix this problem. Note that this might not be a…

I recently ran into an issue when setting up a new LDAP directory using OpenLDAP 2.4.23 on Mac OSX. The issue was that I would get the following error when attempting to modify any entry in the directory: modifying entry “olcDatabase={1}bdb,cn=config” ldap_modify: Server is unwilling to perform (53) additional info: shadow context; no update referral…

Command line network configuration for the MAC is quite a bit different when compared to Linux or Unix. The networksetup command is used instead of ifconfig to configure devices. The first step is to get a list of all network services – these are really physical and virtual devices, VPNs, etc.. networksetup -listallnetworkservices The next…

One common task that any system administrator will perform is to add a new user to a system or application. I recently had a need to add a new user to a MAC server over an SSH connection and found it much more difficult than it should have been. I ended up writing a script…

I recently had an issue with a customer where I needed to enable remote screen sharing (VNC) on a MAC OSX server from an SSH terminal. Thanks to this post, I was able to get it started up with this command. sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all To connect from a…

A common question or issue that I’ve noted when helping customers when using nginx with daemontools is a flood of messages to the error log relating to a failure to bind on port 80 (or whichever port is configured) like the following: ==> logs/error.log