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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]