Using the FreeIPA PKI with Puppet

How to setup Puppet so it runs inside of Apache using Phusion Passenger, mod_nss, and the certificates from FreeIPA.

What You Make Them Use

Systems and network administrators should always make sure they aren’t spared the typical user experience.

Anycast: IP-SLA HOWTO

The complete configuration necessary to implement anycast DNS using Cisco IP SLA, though it’s a little weird without the background.

Anycast: DGRAM vs. STREAM

For internal anycast services, it doesn’t really matter if it’s using TCP or UDP, so long as your routing protocol fails over quickly.

Anycast: Handling Routes

For internal services, you probably want to have them fail over between sites. Dynamic routing protocols will let you do that.

Anycast: The Interface

If you use a loopback interface for your service, you can share the IP address between two different servers, even on the same LAN.

Anycast: The Loophole

A nifty hack that’s possible in IP networks is the ability to share an IP between servers thousands of miles apart.

Anycast: Networking Introduction

Anycasting is a way to scale geographically by having multiple servers sharing the same IP address.

In-House, M.D.

Most companies won’t build their own roads or maintain their own power plants. That doesn’t mean they can pretend to do without them.

Fedora 14

A long while ago, there was only one distribution that would keep up-to-date with the latest GNOME releases. Unfortunately it’s that way again.

Zenoss Swap Threshold Fixes

One of the recurring problems I have with Zenoss is fixing the swap threshold issue. Basically, if your swap space is less than 1G, you’re stuck with an alarm informing you that there’s less than 1G of swap total. The options are to hack it to increase the threshold (by decreasing the minimum-free threshold), or […]

Customer Service Fail

One of the bad ideas currently infecting companies in the technology field is the LivePerson “chat with a support person now” thing. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons: It’s a gigantic floating piece of garbage distracting me from whatever it is I’m trying to learn about your company or it’s products. The representatives […]

Distributing Static Routes with DHCP

I’m setting up an isolated network for people to test internal applications on, since the developers all have Sun workstations with a dual-port Gigabit NIC on the motherboard, and we’ve got a bunch of older network equipment that we haven’t gotten around to eBaying yet. What I’m doing is linking the second NICs together with […]