Miscellaneous Ramblings

Whenever I discuss configuration management with anyone that is new to the concept, and even some people that have been doing it for a while.  There’s one concept that comes up that I have to argue with people about incessantly.  It’s this concept of concatenation.  Basically what people want to do is have this stub of a file be global, this other stub only effect this particular subset of machines, this other stub affect this other subset, then finally a stub that’s host specific. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve done this twice now and both times tried to look it up and got nowhere, and figured it out on my own.  Write it down stupid!

• download the custom CA cert from wherever it may be
• double click it, it will launch Keychain Access
• add said cert to the X509Anchors chain
• restart any apps that are going to look for that cert

That’s it, easy in a mac kinda way.

In doing some reading I found the pwsafe password database.  There are quite a few things out there to manage passwords, but I like this one because of it’s copy/paste integration and that you can dump the db to text pretty easily to share it with others.  In my field you always end up with some way of sharing root passwords etc with other people that you work with in some secure manner.  My favorite has always been gpg encrypted files, it’s easy it works, it’s platform independent for the most part.  This lets you combine that with a common format and a little more ease of use.

Configuration Management has been a interesting topic to me for quite some time. To me it does a couple of things, not only does it make life as a sysadmin much, much easier. But also it combines scripting and code development with system configuration. Read the rest of this entry »

I nabbed this from off google to solve the same problem. You are using screen and you disconnect and come back later and all your ssh auth sessions are broken. I modified it a bit to be friendlier about locations.

if [ ! -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then
    screen_ssh_agent=/var/tmp/${LOGNAME}/state/ssh-agent-screen
    if [ "$TERM" = "screen" ]; then
        SSH_AUTH_SOCK=${screen_ssh_agent}; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
    else
        if [ ! -d "$(dirname ${screen_ssh_agent})" ]; then
            mkdir -p $(dirname ${screen_ssh_agent})
        fi
        ln -snf ${SSH_AUTH_SOCK} ${screen_ssh_agent}
    fi
fi

Enjoy…