Tag Archives: sysadmin

How to Manually Clean Indexes from Elasticsearch

In a previous post we covered getting started with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).  Now we need to remove old indexes manually from an Elasticsearch datastore sorted by age.  We’ll be using the curator tool in a sandbox using … Continue reading

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Creating lots of iSCSI LUNs Quickly on Netapp

I’ve been using Netapp technology since Ontap 6 before flexible volumes were around, and it’s my favorite commercial storage platform.  They provide a robust CLI and you can automate repetitive tasks by using SSH and a bit of creativity.  Recently … Continue reading

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Linux RAID Disk Replacement with Sans Digital 8-bay eSATA tower

There’s plenty of useful articles and guides on managing Linux software RAID floating around.  I recently had a disk failure in my 8-bay eSATA array and thought I’d add to the mix.  Here’s what I did, including some notes specific … Continue reading

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Devconf2016 – Trystack: Free OpenStack for Planet Earth

I gave a talk at the annual Linux Users and Developers Conference (Devconf 2016) in Brno, Czech Republic on Trystack.org: architecture, operations insights, tooling, automation and what it takes to run a large, public OpenStack cloud for the general public. … Continue reading

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How to Manually Create/Tune an Elasticsearch Index

The ELK stack provides a very powerful set of tools that allow administrators and developers unfettered access and customizable log aggregation across any manner of server, application or device.  Recently I needed to stand up a new ELK stack on … 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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Trystack.org: Free, Public OpenStack for Earth

Trystack.org is a free, public OpenStack sandbox for developers and ordinary people to try out OpenStack or test their apps.  It’s been around since 2012 but has recently been revamped by Kambiz Aghaiepour, Dan Radez and myself.  Sponsored by the … 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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Automated OpenStack Deployments with Foreman and Puppet

Demo of a large, 70 node bare-metal deployment  we did at the Red Hat Summit in April 2014 showcasing an OpenStack Havana deployment via Puppet and Foreman.  There are other tools for this now like StayPuft or most recently RDO-Manager … 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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