Dell MD36xxf Storage Array Setup

Today we received a new storage array : a Dell PowerVault MD3600f with two MD1200 expension units. In order to use those new disks, we had a bit of home work todo. Here's how we did it.

But you must be warned : this ain't my best blog post.

HOWTO : Replace a failed disk drive in a FreeBSD ZFS pool

In this blog post, we will repair a broken ZFS pool from a FreeBSD server. The machine is running FreeBSD 9.2, but so long as your FreeBSD machine runs a ZFS enabled FreeBSD, all the commands in this article should work.

A little background on this machine. It's been in production for about four years now. It was originally installed with four 750 GB disk drives as a raidz2 pool. The OS has been upgraded several times and so is the disk drives (because that's what fails of course, hence this post). This is a ZFS-only machine built by following the ZFS only FreeBSD installation wiki with GPT formated disks.

HOWTO : Configure OpenSSH to Fetch Public Keys from OpenLDAP for Authentication on CentOS

Today we will configure our OpenLDAP server to store SSH public keys so that the OpenSSH daemon can fetch them and thus authenticate our users.

To do this, we first need two CentOS machines. This is easy to achieve via a KickStart. If you need help building a KickStart server, follow my previous blog post. Then we need a working OpenLDAP server. If you don't have one, then follow my previous blog posts to set one up.

HOWTO : CentOS 6 KickStart Server

This blog post will explain how to build a Kickstart server which is used to automatically perform untattended OS installation and configuration of both RedHat 6 and CentOS 6 machines.

Kickstart is basically a copy of the Solaris Jumpstart. If you manage IBM AIX machines, it's the equivalent of NIM. Or Ignite in the HP-UX world.

RCS and sudo log names

If you're tired of always seeing the root user in the RCS $Id$ tags, then follow this short and to the point blog post to switch this to the real author.

Map Apple Keyboard on Windows 7 and Restore Apple Function Keys

This is a short post just to redirect all Apple Keyboard users on Windows 7 machines to a great blog that explains how to get the full functions of the keyboard.

Check the Map Apple Keyboard on Windows 7 and Restore Apple Function Keys for more info.

CentOS yum(8) Error « No module named cElementTree » Fixed

I've been having problems with yum(8) on one of the CentOS 6 x86_64 machines. After looking at many different forums and bug reports, I now found the solution.