I wanted to create a twitter feed of things my daughters were doing with the goal of easily updating the grandparents on what they were doing. Now, they aren't twitter users but I use twitter enough that it was an easy medium. I wrote a little python script that runs every few minutes and emails them the updates.

At the university, we use PRTG for all sorts of monitoring. I'd been working with porting our disk monitoring we currently do for Windows servers in perfmon alerts to PRTG. That seems to work fine and PRTG seemed like a good choice for monitoring Linux partitions seeing as we really hadn't had a good solutions for it yet.

According to this bug report, one must create the pdf output folder prior to installing cups-pdf. If you don't, you'll get a "/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf failed" error in the printer status. To fix this issue mkdir ~/PDF prior to installing cups-pdf.

Cheers!

In my stupidity, I hastily followed someone's recommendation to fix a printing problem (which I will post in a minute). This person suggested that to fix a cups-pdf problem, one should remove all cups stuff and then just reinstall cups-pdf. After having done this not only did cups-pdf not work but the envince document viewer (the default ubuntu pdf reader) was gone, plus a bunch of other cups packages.

Apparently, if you accidentally remove default packages in the desktop version, you can restore them as easy as:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Welcome! In an earlier post, I had mentioned that the university was in the midst of finding a new listserver software and that we had landed on Mailman. This article outlines our setup, taken mainly from the documentation but boiled down to the essentials for me and probably most people.

You could probably install mailman from the apt repos and be just fine, but I chose to do it from source so that I got a deeper understanding of it and to customize certain aspects.

We have a set of 11 linux servers that function as our VMware hosts. While these systems are not necessarily all the same hardware, they need to look identical as it relates to software and kernel versions. I’ve been working on system to automate the tasks done on these machines. What I’ve come up with has so far and will work pretty well.

Eureka! I found it. So now I can automate the vmware-config.pl part of the installation. It turns out that VMware Server keeps a database of sorts in /etc/vmware/locations. This is created during the vmware-install.pl run. If you append “answer EULA_AGREED yes” (without the quotes) to the locations file, it will not present you with the EULA. Here is the complete code. Again, please comment.

I’ve been looking around the net to find a way to automate a VMware Server install on Linux. In the documentation there is a way to automate the install for Windows, but not Linux. In our environment, we run a minimal Ubuntu 7.10 install for our hosts. Below is my hackish attempt to automate it. This works for our environment but I make no claims it will work for yours. The first script (shown below) installs the packages and sets a couple variables that are important to us.