Archive for the ‘How-Tos / Tips’ Category

No Software Repositories in SuSE Enterprise on EC2

For anyone who knows SuSE Enterprise, you can file this one under “what a n00b!” (my SuSE experience in the past has been with openSUSE), but I recently inherited a project that required RHEL or SuSE Enterprise so they chose to deploy SuSE Enterprise on EC2 to reduce acquisition time. (Who would’ve thought a cloud provider like Amazon would be faster to acquire an install of one of these softwares that used more traditional licensing models?) Anyway, I needed to install a few extra pieces of software, but when I ran yast, its list of repositories was empty!? Turns out the fix is really easy, but I couldn’t easily find the answer within a minute or two, so I thought I’d share:

suse_register -a email="myemail@whatan00b.com"

Yup, that was it. No license key required (at least on the EC2 build). Novell just wanted my email address.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Mar 25th, 2011

Zimbra Upgrade to 7.0

Upgraded my Zimbra system from 6.0.9 (haven’t kept up-to-date with the 6.0.x series) to 7.0 tonight. The upgrade was pretty straightforward (though a couple of weird things happened). Just have to install sqlite3 as an added prerequisite on my platform (Ubuntu 10.04 x64):
apt-get install sqlite3

At the end of the upgrade, it the upgrader complained a bit about finding my license file. I have a valid license, and I just hit enter to go past the message and it wasn’t an issue after that…
Looking for valid license to install...failed to install license.
*******ERROR
Failed to install a license - this will prevent your server from functioning properly
Please contact Zimbra to obtain a license
Press RETURN to continue Activating license...license activated.

One more note. Once again, I lost my MTA and zimbraMailMode settings. :(

I haven’t had time yet to play with the new fanciness, but the geek inside me didn’t allow me to let a major upgrade sit for too long. So far I’m at least digging the new UI.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (2) : Feb 10th, 2011

Monitor APC Stats with Zenoss

I’ve (finally) published my first public project to the Internets! It’s a set of scripts to grab stats from the APC PHP opcode cacher for graphing inside Zenoss (though should be compatible with Nagios). It’s incredibly simple, but I have yet to find anyone else who has done this for Zenoss so I thought I would share in case it’s helpful. For now, it just grabs the hit ratio of the cache.

In the famous last words of many an open source project, “In the future, I plan on adding”:

  1. fragmentation graphs
  2. a ZenPack for easy installation
  3. Ideas?

Grab the scripts at Github and rough install instructions are listed on the README page.

Here’s a fairly boring screenshot of the graph in action:

Filed under How-Tos / Tips, News : Comments (1) : Jan 28th, 2011

Using API Tools on Amazon AMIs

I did a fairly deep dive into some new cool things in EC2 this weekend and ran into something that caught me off guard. The default Amazon AMIs come with the EC2 tools pre-loaded and ready to go. Or so I read. But, when trying to run, I was greeted with a nice stack trace:

Unexpected error:
javax.net.ssl.SSLException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected error: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty
at sun.security.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:208)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1665)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1628)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1611)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1537)
at sun.security.ssl.AppOutputStream.write(AppOutputStream.java:83)
(snipped)

Turns out it doesn’t quite have everything it needs. Even though it’s complaining about trustAnchors and such, all it really needs is a Java Runtime Environment..

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 13th, 2010

.local CNAME Queries Failing on OS X 10.6.5

I was helping my sister with an issue with connecting to her school’s email server from her MacBook last night and discovered something interesting. Her school uses a webmail.domain.com address for the front end for OWA which is just a CNAME to its real address – a .local address. This all worked fine until a few weeks or so ago – we later pieced together that that’s when she upgraded to 10.6.5.

It seems that in 10.6.5, OS X can’t follow that CNAME for some reason. I could ping the .local address just fine and the browser connected just fine, but when I tried to use the .com CNAME’d hostname, it would fail. The kicker? The dig utility seems to ignore all of this madness which made it lie to me, and that did not help at all while troubleshooting.

I was able to find an Apple forum thread about this with someone saying that rolling back the mDNS binaries to those shipped with 10.6.4 seemed to fix it, but it didn’t help in my case (and some others in the thread). I personally don’t use anything at work or at home using the .local domain, but I hope this gets fixed soon as it breaks a lot of Microsoft-centric networks as a lot tend to use .local for one reason or another..

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 7th, 2010

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