Earlier this week I did a portsupgrade(8) on my FreeBSD puppetmaster. After the upgrade was completed, puppet stopped working and was displaying these errors: err: /File[/var/puppet/lib]: Failed to generate additional resources using ‘eval_generate’: No format match the given format name…
Category: Computing
Information about different aspects in computing
DualHead2Go
The DualHead2Go is a graphics expansion box from Matrox. What does it do? It allows someone to have dual (or triple) monitors attached to a laptop. It does this by mapping the monitors to look like one large monitor to…
Puppet’s Exec type is lying
Using puppet, you can trigger a command after a file is updated. This works really well where I want to update the sendmail.mc file, run make sendmail.cf and then restart the sendmail process. This is exactly what I want, but…
Restoring ZFS filesystems on FreeBSD
This past weekend, I wound up rebuilding the ZFS filesystem on my FreeBSD box. I went from a 2+1 RaidZ (5) system to a 4+1 and in the process increased the slice of each disk. After much trial and error,…
createrepo on FreeBSD
What is createrepo(8)? createrepo(8) is a python(1) script which reads the RPM metadata and creates XML files that yum(8) can use to determine what a RPM package provides, requires and may conflict with. To find out more details visit the…
Network filesystem performance on MacBook Air
Just after Christmas, I bought myself a new 11in MacBook Air (MB Air) to replace the 12in PowerBook G4 (PB) that I’ve kept running entirely too long. I selected the 4GB Ram, 128 GB SSD configuration as the system is…
Fighting foreign language spam
The single largest class of spam that seems to get into my inbox is foreign language spam. The spam seems to get through the multiple anti-spam layers I use: sendmail SpamCop SpamHaus MailScanner -> Spam Assassin / ClamAV Procmail Mac…
GPG key length and signing RPM packages
For the last two years when I have created my new GPG key I have forgotten to limit the key length to 1024 bits. This is needed because when signing RPM packages you can sign the packages with 2048 bit…
perl, the s/// operator and meta-characters
The other day I was working on adding some extended validation of Nagios confg files. I have been using Nagios::Object for this job. What I was specifically testing is in the command object, to see if what was in the…
Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8), unattended Jumpstarts, sysidcfg locations and Linux NFS v3 server
At a previous job, we had a combined Solaris Jumpstart and RedHat Kickstart server to install new systems. Now that I’ve moved on from that position, I decided I needed to reproduce that functionality — with a few differences: Support…