Archive for the ‘Systems Administration’ Category

ssh-agent-proxy is my new SSH love

ssh-agent-proxy is an elegant solution to ensuring remote screen sessions are connected to the current SSH connection for agent access

New and updated Ubuntu packages for AWS

Attended my first UDS and volunteered to help maintain existing and new Ubuntu packages for AWS

Listing Amazon EC2 events

I have a post over on our work blog about listing pending events in Amazon’s EC2 using python and boto.  Maybe I’ll post to the work blog more regularly than I post here.  

Atlassian Crowd, Apache, and cookie-based authentication

We and some of our customers use Atlassian’s Crowd as a SSO solution.  I was surprised to find that Atlassian does not provide code to enable Apache to use cookie-based authentication.  Their only Apache solution is based around HTTP Basic Authentication.  I found an open JIRA issue about this and from there found some code […]

Munin, mysql, and mk-heartbeat

I’ve been playing around a bit with Munin and the great plug-in mysql_ I wrote a patch that adds support for mk-heartbeat from the Maatkit toolkit.

Matching up private and public SSH keys

I’m assuming we’re talking about OpenSSH.  There are other things out there like Putty and (incredibly) commercial versions of SSH, but thankfully I don’t have to touch those. The easiest mechanism for matching up the keys are the fingerprints.  The fingerprint is always of the public key.  There is no fingerprint for the private key.  […]

How Amazon calculates private key fingerprints

Short answer: I still don’t know as I haven’t looked at the code (or if it is even available.) Even shorter answer: ec2-fingerprint-key Why such an obvious post?  Well, I spent far too much time trying to figure out how to match up the information returned by ec2-describe-keypairs with the files I had on disk.  […]

Quick fixes for NAGIOS plug-in check_dell_warranty

Erinn Looney-Triggs wrote a nice plug-in for NAGIOS to check the warranty status of your Dell boxes with Dell.  However, some of the systems I support are running a seriously old version of Dell OMSA.  I sent him a quick patch back in May to handle old OMSA versions: [root@x plugins]# diff -p check_dell_warranty check_dell_warranty_test […]

The United States is not Mexico

The Problem Report A programmer I support sent me the following last October: Hey Jim, I just found a difference between our windows and unix boxes regarding time that is standing in the way of me finishing […] I’ve been working on and wanted your help. [Description of test code and environment] This is Test.java […]