A simple demonstration using KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) from the command line interface.

Sorry for the slight graphics artefacts, I was testing out some screencast software for the first time.

Watch it on youtube, here.

I was really excited to be part of the first community podcast for Opscode Chef, Food Fight. Here is a link to the podcast audio and also the show notes.

Our System Administration team colloborated with Opscode to put together a Case Study detailing our use of their System automation framework, Opscode Chef.

Case Study: Opscode + Marshall University web pdf

So I\’m blowing away, and re-installing, my Steam Bottle on Codeweaver\’s Crossover games. I was hoping to get some in-game overlay support for the Community/Friends features of Steam. I really really want to hang on to Team Fortress/Left 4 Dead settings though.

Using the find command we can solve this problem fairly easy.

In this installment of my blog, I want to document the proper use of rsync for folks who are tasked with moving a large amount of data. I\’ll even show you a few things you can do from the command line interface to extend the built-in capability of rsync using a little bash-scripting trickery.

I use rsync to migrate Oracle databases between servers at least a few times per year. In a snap, its one of the easiest ways to clone a database from a Production server to a Pre-Production/Development server or even a Virtual Machine. You don’t have to have a fancy Fibre-Channel or iSCSI storage array attached to both servers, in order to do a data LUN clone, thanks to rsync.

I hope you enjoy this in-depth article. Please feel free to comment: if you need clarification, find it useful, or something I wrote is just plain wrong.

Abstract

This document outlines in a detailed step-by-step fashion, how to properly configure iSCSI initiator, and multi-path I/O software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.

Copyright © 2010, Marshall University Systems Infrastructure Team
Author: Eric G. Wolfe 
Contributor: Jaymz Mynes 
Editor: Tim Calvert 

Marshall University 
400 Hal Greer Blvd. 
Huntington, WV 25755 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share 
Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, 
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ 
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 
300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. 

The block M logo is a trademark of Marshall University. All other 
trademarks are owned by their respective owners. 

Occasionally I have to resize partitions on iSCSI or Fiber-Channel attached SAN storage. Both technologies allow you to easily extend the available storage for a host by extending LUNs, or volumes. A common problem after extending the size of the LUN, or volume, is resizing partitions to fill out the new size.

For the most part, I usually fire up PartedMagic and its a snap, even with Fiber-Channel attached enterprise storage. Once the HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) have been zoned to Fiber-Channel switches, then the HBAs do all the heavy lifting. In other words on Fiber-Channel, it doesn’t matter if you’re using PartedMagic, or Knoppix, the server just knows where the storage is and whether it is in an attached state. The only dependency for this working on a Live boot disk are drivers for the HBA cards.

So occasionally I do have to touch a Windows system, or use a Windows-only management tool (I’m looking at you VMware). Not that I have any problem with Microsoft or Windows, I’m really just more comfortable in a Unix-like environment. I do use the Open Source rdesktop utility to access Windows machine using version 5.0 of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

It’s a handy utility, but I really wish it would give me an appropriate resolution based on the current resolution of my laptop’s X Windows session. There is, in fact, a command line flag to alter the geometry of the remote desktop window. However, typing in rdesktop -g 1280x1024 is much more tedious than typing in rdesktop on the command line interface.

These are my presentation slides for the 2009 Ohio Linuxfest. I gave a talk on the topic of network and multi-booting with Syslinux and configuring systems with Kickstart.

• Syslinux website.
• How I learned to stop worrying, and love PXE booting slides.
• Presentation audio on Archive.org
• Linux server installed with Oracle pre-requisites, in 15 minutes or less, on Youtube.

These are my presentation slides for the 2008 Ohio Linuxfest. I gave a well recieved talk on the topic of Windows, and Active Directory, Linux integration using Samba. My krb5 handles the krb5.conf and pam configurations outlined in the examples below.