Marek Mahut

Red Hat Czech announced an open conference in Brno for all open source developers and users (yeah, sysadmins are also users). The list of presentations and workshops is growing and I already found some interested topics I’m looking forward to attend. Bookmark the link to its wiki page, more information will follow shortly.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DeveloperConference2009

Recently I bought an external USB Disk Seagate FreeAgent XTreme, but after some idle time, it spanned down. Take me a while to find out how to disable this standby mode. First install sdparm.
If you want to start the drive in standby:
sdparm –command=start /dev/sdb
To clean standby mode flag:
sdparm –clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdb && sdparm -a [...]

Wow! Even VMware understood the power of open source, they just announced open souce vmware client. Who will get it first into Fedora? ;)

Did it ever happen to you by mistake to add one additional digit into dns serial number? Ooops! Now, how to fix it?

Increase the serial number to (2^31) – (correct serial number) and reload named. For example 2^31-2009010602 = 138473046. As DNS serial numbers are signed integers, this make server thinks that it’s a negative [...]

Interesting report from pingdom about uptime of Linux ditros’ homepage (but also Apple and Microsoft). I’m more than happy to see Fedora and Red Hat taking leading positions in this benchmark.

If you are using clustered service with kerberos, you may want to merge hostnames keytab files to one for simple distribution.

Create host and service principals.

kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node1.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node2.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node3.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node4.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node5.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node6.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc -randkey host/node7.corp.intranet.lan
kadmin: addprinc [...]

Mike McGrath, the Fedora infrastructure lead, made an awesome presentation on puppet and how to use it. Slides and audio record are posted at http://mmcgrath.fedorapeople.org/puppet/.

From time to time, I need to clean my disk from useless stuff I’ve installed over time. It’s just amazing how much of packages I can install during debugging and configuring every day. If I’m short of disk space, I start first by reviewing biggest packages on my system:
[mmahut@mmahut repo]$ rpm -qa –queryformat ‘%10{size} %{name}-%{version}\n’ [...]