MuchTall.com

After having a SourceForge account for about 10 years, I’m canceling it for one reason and one reason alone: Spam. SourceForge has this “feature” where anyone can email you at yourusername@users.sourceforge.net, and they will happily forward it on to the email address you have on file with SF. That’s great, except, I don’t want spam [...]

Just making a quick post to help out any Googler’s out there looking for the solution to this problem. I had a Dell SC1425 pizza box server with an error/alarm light on it’s face recently. The alarm showed up when the server had been rebooted after a full lockup. I downloaded the Dell DSET utility [...]

Today I was troubleshooting a couple of network printers. One of them, I believed, had an incompatibility with “Standard TCP/IP” printing, via RAW communications. I tired other printer port options, including the HP TCP/IP port. I found out later on that the printer itself (a multifunction copier actually) did not have printing capability enabled. In [...]

Though I still know my way around, it’s been a while since I messed with a Cisco router to any great degree. But today at work I had to configure a Cisco 1750 to reply to one of our offices. I like backing up configs before I blow away a router, just so that I [...]

For about 2 years now at work, our "root" (aka, Administrator) account hasn’t been showing up as being part of the "Domain Admins" group within Windows, or when running "id root" or "net rpc user info root". It used to, but for whatever unknown reason, stopped working.
The root account in our LDAP directory was, admittedly, [...]

Today at work we had a complaint that one of our remote offices couldn’t  make a new job posting to Monster.com. Many of our offices have transparent squid implemented, and this is one of them.
Then error that the user would see was:
The following error was encountered: The request or reply is too large.

According to a [...]

At work we had an FC3 system that had apparently undergone an abrupt reboot or power outage. After it came back up, the CPU usage was at 100%, so bad that I could not run top. Stopping httpd and nscd seemed to help make the system responsive, though udev kept working hard.
Deleting /var/run/nscd and /var/db/nscd, [...]

At
work we had a network that has no internet access, except what we
provide via their VPN connection that had been allowed through the
firewall. Simple, until a small problem arose where our VPN server,
which is not configured for NAT, has it’s default gateway set for it’s
direct connection to the internet, and not the router which serves [...]

At work we got in a brand spankin’ new Dell PowerEdge SC440. And what’s the problem with brand spankin’ new hardware? Driver support. Fedora Core 5 didn’t install drivers for our ethernet interface. As seen in lspci…
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Unknown device 167a (rev 02)
How do you solve this? Well, first off, you need [...]

I wrote up a small perl script that will run any executable file in /etc/cron.runonce once and remove that file. It’s handy when we need to remotely deploy a change to multiple servers and make sure that we don’t leave remnants of those scripts in cron. Download it and evaluate the variables for your needs. [...]

Today at work we had a situation where a server wasn’t coming back on the network after a reboot. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but the server was across the ocean in a vastly different timezone, so troubleshooting normally has to be done in a 2-hour window.
It turned out that the sk98lin module [...]

I recently designed a deployment of Pyla/HylaFax for one of our offices. Part of this deployment required that we convert their WinFax Address Book(s) to Pyla’s address book. To do this I wrote up a short perl script. You can get it here:
winfax2pyla.pl
Do me a favor and let me know if it helped you out!

At work we use XFS primarily on / to allow us greater flexibility with file size, filesystem size, and inode limits. It’s been working out great until FC6 came out. For some reason when you install an FC6 system using xfs (boot the install with "linux xfs"), the install goes great, but the system can’t [...]

Today we had a problem at work where, after adding two 400G drives and a SATA controller to a server and adding the two drives to the root logical volume, the system would not boot. It would kernel panic because LVM could not find the drives. Turns out the SATA controller driver wasn’t being loaded [...]

I’ve been meaning to create blog of work accomplishments and have never quite gotten around to it, so I’m just going to start dropping them here. Here’s a round up of things that I have accomplished so far:

cleanupsmbd.pl: Wrote a workaround script to kill off smbd processes before they start to bring a server to [...]