I was just handed a new revised Amazon Machine Image to employ, a fully-compliant corporate beast intended to facilitate keeping servers secure. I have extensive experience stripping builds for security purposes. The Solaris OS I worked with at Fidelity had stripped out all the graphical pieces integral to Solaris at that time, and paid SUN…
Continue Readingsystem administration
Reload Jenkins Using a Script and the API
Ansible’s system module restarts the jenkins service. If you call this to restart during the install process or during the boot process you cause Jenkins to be unavailable. At one point (because of errant Nessus scan configs) the instances at boot were so loaded that the restart could take 4+ minutes. This caused a cascading…
Continue ReadingUpdated (DevOps) Resume…
What the hell is DevOps anyway? Many companies are hiring DevOps Engineers and it is a nebulous title – a hard skill set to nail down and most companies implementing it don’t really know what they are trying to do. DevOps is the pipeline between developers and deployment to production traffic. The holy grail is…
Continue Readingfiles hidden under a filesystem mount
I ran into a server that showed 83% used on the / filesystem. But… A du -ak | sort -nr | more showed no files or folders using the space. The server had a back history of a missing mount, which had caused the filesystem to fill up to 100%. I suspected that the now-mounted…
Continue Readingmapping the memory within a java process
At the system level, you can look at not just how much memory a process is using, but where it is using the memory, in detail. Use pmap… First find the process id: [root@jbtest ~]# ps -ef | grep java bbod 11987 11929 0 Feb29 ? 00:04:03 /opt/jdk/bin/java -Dprogram.name=run.sh -server -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dcom.test.cookiedomain=test.com -Dtangosol.mode=prod…
Continue ReadingChange the time cron.daily runs
I’ve had many environments where we get alerts or strange behavior at or about 4 AM – the time that linux’s cron.daily runs by default. You can change that 4 AM time – perhaps stagger it among groups of servers. You can change it through puppet if you bring /etc/crontab under puppet control, then a…
Continue Readingtransfer moinmoin wiki to mediawiki
I switched from Moin Moin wiki to Mediawiki for system admin notes. Moin Moin is file-based and the search function failed to return results after I got up into the thousands of entries. Originally in the long ago dark ages this was an Access database, then for a while it was mysql and then postgres…
Continue ReadingWile E. Coyote, Super Genius…
I worked for a startup from 2000 to 2006. The company started out very very casual. Our first security system had blank badges, and then we had badges with our post title and a picture on them. I set up the badge system, and realized at one point that the other side of the badge…
Continue Readingchecking inside rpms
Nine years ago I was trying to find which RPM contained the executable “cluconfig” for configuring clustering – I made these notes on looking for a file in rpms SUMMARY: needed cluconfig for Cluster Manager – searched for cluconfig in install disks for RHAS NOTES: mount the disk, cd to RPMS directory, run: for i…
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