Archive for July, 2008

Sun Ray Server Software 4, Beta Update 2 – running on CentOS

Here’s my quick notes on getting SRSS 4, Beta Update 2 (the latest) running on Centos 4.4. Read more

2008
07/19
CATEGORY
Software
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Clustering: Don’t turn the Rocks firewall off unless you know what you’re doing…

Recently Professor Diana Franklin was awarded an NSF grant to build a small high performance computing cluster here on campus. As the “friendly neighborhood system administrator” I volunteered to help build and run it. We chose UCSD’s Rocks Linux based clustering software for it. Rocks comes”out of the box” with most thing installed and configured correctly, even complicated things like Ganglia, a cluster monitor, or Sun Grid Engine, a job scheduler. Rocks makes it easy. Having said that, however, don’t tinker with Rocks components unless you know what you are doing… Read more

2008
07/17
CATEGORY
High Performance Computing and Clusters
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Unix – Active Directory Integration

Currently I support thousands of users on hundreds of machines in a mixed Unix and Windows environment. The legacy environment has 2 separate systems to administer user accounts. On Unix, we still (!?!) use plain old NIS. For Windows, we use Windows Server 2003 R2 with Active Directory (AD). AD can theoretically support Unix authentication, and promises to offer a “one stop shop” for integrated account management. Does it really work? Read more to find out… Read more

2008
07/06
CATEGORY
Unix-Windows Integration
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Monitor your stuff: Nagios

Nagios is a system monitoring tool that runs on Unix/Linux platforms, but will monitor practically anything - Unix, Windows, databases, environmental/HVAC, you name it. Nagios is good, and works well – but it isn’t easy to configure. Read more

2008
07/01
CATEGORY
Software
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
© 2009 Gregory L. Porter.

Disclaimer

This is *MY* blog, not my employer's. I pay for the hosting. Any opinions expressed here are my own. Your mileage may vary. Don't take the red pill. Do not meddle in the affairs of system administrators, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
"The [atomic] bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project.