greg haygood

I recently needed to upgrade a client's servers from Debian Sarge to Lenny.  The client is not in the US, and has a low bandwidth (yet still high cost!) connection for their servers.  So running the netinst upgrade isn't a viable option since it will take so long and eat up so much of their quota.  On the other hand, Lenny is now up to 3 DVDs.  Even if most of what is needed is on the first disc, the hassle of configuring the CD repos is a big pain, considering that these are servers with a very tightly controlled set of packages already installed.  So I didn't want

To go along with the previous post about building a custom install CD, I wanted to create a custom splash screen with the product's logo instead of the one from CentOS. The syslinux/isolinux mechanism requires it own format, but it's still really easy to accomplish:

Unless you're going to use a specific VGA resolution on boot, you'll need an image 640 pixels wide, and up to 480 pixels tall. 480 will fill the screen, but in order to display instructions/help underneath, you'll want less.

I needed a custom install disc for CentOS 5 in order to bundle some additional RPMs. Revisor has the promise, but it remains unstable and mostly unusable many months after I first gave it a shot. So until they knock out those issues, here are the instructions for rolling your own. I couldn't find anything specific to C5, so based this loosely on some CentoS 4.1 instructions.

I got Zenoss to gather messages from syslog today. Actually, I had it up a few days ago, but was having a problem that I finally resolved today. We already have a centralized syslog server in the data center using syslog-ng, so everything is hitting the monitor station. So logically it should be easy to feed the messages into Zenoss. But of course it never is. I ran into 2 problems:

I came across ezPublish as a possible nice CMS for use in a couple projects I'm working on, but stumbled when it required PHP4. Rather than downgrading my full Apache2 instance just to test the app, I decided to get both 4 and 5 working on my Ubuntu laptop. Seem to be various ways to do it, but the best (er, first) I found was Windows-specific, so in the interests of fair-n-balanced, here's how I did it on my machine.

There seem to be a number of fancy ways to get Windows machines to send their Events to a syslog server, but for downright simplicity, I chose evtsys from the Purdue Engineering Computer Network. To make it even easier, I added a silent installer on top of it using NSIS so we could deploy through our systems management tools.

I spent part of this morning fighting with Rails, trying to get a quick app I wrote hosted below an existing app. It should have been simple, but getting the various pieces cooperating took longer than it should have. The solution is to use the --prefix argument to mongrel_rails. Here's how I got it going:

Scenario:
RailsApp1 hosted as mysite.com/
RailsApp2 hosted as mysite.com/myapp2
Both apps served via Apache 2.0 + mongrel + pen on Debian Sarge

Scripts: