Category Archives: Quick Guides

Short HOWTO style guides for Free Open Source Software stuff

Quickly Sync JPG mtime with EXIF CreateDate

I borrowed a few things, made a few changes, and now all my photos have the correct timestamp on the filesystem. Hooray! The script expects to be in the root directory of the album hierarchy, but that is merely because I am lazy. And it was an excuse to learn about how to find where [...]

SSH key distribution with Ruby and Net::SSH::Multi

When faced with deploying a ssh key to a ton of servers using password authentication, there is but one solution. Ruby, naturally. Below is a script that will iterate through a list of hosts either via STDIN or IO redirection, query for a password once on the command line, then proceed to distribute a specified [...]

ca Makefile missing in action

As this Makefile from the now dead sial.org/howto/openssl/ca/Makefile is much linked to, but nearly impossible to find elsewhere, he’s a copy I eventually pulled from Google: Update, 19 July: The Makefile wasn’t really very useful as that version didn’t work. Instead, I suggest this excellent guide geared towards Puppet, but applicable in general. The openvpn [...]

Chef and dbconfig-common: A world of hurt

In constructing a Chef cookbook for managing dspam, I happened upon dbconfig-common, a framework that allows a package to manage database backends somewhat transparently. However, it has no affinity for preseeding. Another approach is necessary for the libdspam7-drv-mysql package. In the relevant section of the recipe below, the file created to cache relevant database values [...]

Safely unplugging Western Digital My Passport USB drive

Having recently acquired a 1TB WD My Passport SE USB 3.0, I would hate to destroy it. I noticed it shuts down when removed from a Windows system safely, but simply unmounting under Kubuntu via the Device Notifier applet does not have the same effect. Naturally, I become worried about destroying my device. Fortunately, there [...]

Enabling AirLink 101 Golden N AWLL6075 on Ubuntu 10.10

I just grabbed one of these adapters for $10. Naturally it doesn’t work out of the box. Fortunately someone found a solution before I had to fuss with it too much. usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl819xU rtl819xU:FirmwareRequest92S(): failed with TCR-Status: a rtl819xU:ERR!!! _rtl8192_up(): initialization is failed! The solution is easy, though. $ wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/37387612/rtl8192sfw.bin.gz [...]

Hack for remotely bouncing ZyXEL modem EQ-660R

EmbarqCenturyLink goes down so often, I finally had to hack together a lame heartbeat script to bounce the connection if it’s down. I run the script below via cron every 5 minutes. The target IP is this blog host, because it ought to be up and reachable. I later considered using the default route’s IP, [...]

Managing Systems with Chef: Sandbox Play

Chef is an awesome tool for centralized management of systems and resources. Chef recipes are best consumed in a sandbox, first, before being deployed. Below, I describe a simple sandbox setup using VirtualBox and Debian Lenny. Using VirtualBox, define a new virtual machine. I used the business card ISO to install a bare minimum Debian, [...]

Useless user directories on kubuntu

For years, the introduction of certain compulsory directories on a kubuntu install has annoyed me to no end. You can’t simply remove them, as they’re recreated. I’ve never had enough time or inclination to discover how to remove them, because they’re easy to ignore and harmless. The directories are introduced by a package called xdg-user-dirs. [...]

Proxying Zimbra Web and Desktop via Apache 2.2

It’s possible to proxy Zimbra for both the traditional Web client and the newer Zimbra Desktop client. There are some mostly working configurations outlined on the Zimbra wiki, with some mistakes. (I had the same experience with the DAViCal wiki, but Zimbra is a far larger effort.) Before you attempt to reverse proxy anything, please [...]