Category Archives: sysadmin

Learning OpenStack Networking (Neutron) 2nd Edition

I’ve recently had the pleasure of editing/reviewing the new second edition OpenStack Neutron book by James Denton.  It’s published by Pakt Publishing who has also published a few other OpenStack-related books, including one by Dan Radez on OpenStack Essentials. OpenStack … Continue reading

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Rate Limiting and Multicast on Dell Force10 Switches

Sometimes it’s hard finding extensive, easily digestible documentation on FTOS running on the Dell Force10 switch platform.  Recently we had to apply simple rate limiting against ports generating more bandwidth than they should but not get too in the weeds … Continue reading

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Create vsftpd Users the Easy Way

The FTP protocol has been around a long time, some of us remember using it fondly while others might shudder at the very mention of its name.  The fact remains it’s not going away, and it does what it’s supposed … Continue reading

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Take Control of your Email with Mutt, OfflineIMAP and Notmuch

I’ve been an avid user of the Mutt email client for quite some time, preferring it to GUI clients or web for its speed, hotkey-everything approach, and integration with vim that compliment my daily workflow.  Still, I found search functionality … Continue reading

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Getting OpenStack Tenant Info by Floating IP Address

When running a public cloud you sometimes need to obtain user or tenant information quickly based on their public IP address.  Here is a simple shell tool to accomplish this rather than having to piece together information in several commands, … Continue reading

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Make OpenStack Glance Images Accessible to Selective Tenants

Recently I needed to make a Glance image available to a specific user but not make it public.  In this example an image needed to be available only to the services tenant and owner.  There’s a facility for this inside … Continue reading

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Automating Dell iDRAC Administration with Racadm

Managing more than a handful of Dell servers becomes cumbersome using the iDRAC web interface.  This is especially painful with several hundred servers or more.  Luckily Dell provides CLI tools you can use with XML templates to automate provisioning and … Continue reading

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Simple Disk Performance Testing with Linux

I recently did some testing on my home Linux fileserver with Bonnie++ at the urging of a friend who wanted to compare his numbers.   I also ran similar tests with dd and hdparm.  Here’s what I ran, the results, and … Continue reading

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Using KWin with Xfce

I’ve been a long-time Xfce user as I’ve bounced around any manner of window manager and desktop environment since the turn of the century. I always found 3D effects like viewing all window spaces, and exposé-type features to be useful … Continue reading

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OpenStack Essentials by Dan Radez

I’ve recently had the pleasure of helping edit/review the awesome OpenStack Essentials by my friend and colleague Dan Radez.  Highly recommended reading for anyone getting into OpenStack who is interested in an easy-to-read deep dive of OpenStack, setting up your … Continue reading

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Create OpenStack Users the Easy Way

When you’ve created more than one OpenStack user via the CLI or Horizon dashboard it gets old really quick.  It’s a good idea to automate it or use a tool to do the job for you.

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Secure Cloud Data Backups using Python, Tar and GPG

The Cloud (aka another dude’s computer) is a great place to backup your data, files and make your life easier and your technical resources more accessible.  It can also be extremely dangerous if you don’t take steps to protect your … Continue reading

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Workaround for Foreman-Proxy Scale Issue: DHCPD and lots of VM’s

Foreman is an awesome provisioning, utility and life-cycle management solution for Linux and UNIX-like server infrastructure.  It unifies a lot of things like DHCP, DNS, PXE, and automated provisioning into one tool.  Unfortunately we’ve hit some issues with scaling the … Continue reading

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Guide: Laptop Hybrid Suspend on Linux

One feature desktop Linux has been lacking out of the box is hybrid-suspend, supported as of Kernel versions 3.6+. The following guide lets you suspend to both memory and disk, so you never lose your work if your battery is … Continue reading

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Fixing the Atrocious Lenovo Touchpad

Sadly Lenovo got a whiff of Macintosh style fervor and got a little overzealous with their current laptop offerings, resulting in a really irritating button-less laptop design. Luckily, you can revert this to be usable like the older models using … Continue reading

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