Tips &Amp; Tricks on usrlocal.com

What I recommend for a wireless setup

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 04:22:33 +0000

Normally talking about wireless networks isn’t the most exciting thing that one can talk about. But over the years I have been asked what my thoughts are for a setup or if I would setup a wireless network for someone. With that in mind, this is what I would recommend for a wireless setup if you were doing one from scratch. My in-laws built a new house a little while back and we did some planning ahead of time to account for a future access point that would be mounted once the drywall, texture and paint were all up. The plan is essentially still the same of what I would put in today, though I might go with a few more access points based on the size of the house. I recently just added another to my setup of the same model I have down below.

How to get WordPress’ version from the CLI

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 05:18:53 +0000

Have you ever been in that situation where you have CLI access to a wordpress site but not through the GUI? I had that experience recently and wanted to know which version of wordpress the person was using. Mainly, I wanted to see if they were keeping things up to date.

So with this handy one liner I found scouring through the web, you can do exactly that.

# find . -name 'version.php' -path '*wp-includes/*' -print -exec grep '$wp_version =' {} \; -exec echo '' \;
./wordpress/wp-includes/version.php
$wp_version = '4.1.1';

Puppet: sslv3 alert certificate revoked

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:24:46 +0000

Have you ever had one of those days where you see on your dashboard one of your long lost boxen is no longer successfully reporting into your beloved puppet master? I’ve had a problem child as of late and I’m not sure if it was a security patch for openssl or if it was when the box moved from one virtual environment into a vCloud environment. But whatever the reason, I was suddenly seeing red when I would manually run my puppet agent command on the box. Here is the error I was seeing:

Scotty Factor

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:00:27 +0000

If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you do some sort of project work within your job. My blog doesn’t attact a lot of people outside of IT and the typical IT guy is working on project X, Y or Z and sometimes all 3 at the same time. If this isn’t you, I’ll save you some time and you can stop reading now.

Ok, so you are working with your boss and he/she has assigned you a project. Maybe its mapped out with all of the details or if you are like me, you will typically get a broad project goal and its your job to come up with the milestones and timeline.

Keeping a package up to date with puppet

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:36:19 +0000

Today I came into work with the following messages in my logwatch emails:

Last Status:
WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED!
WARNING: Local version: 0.97.4 Recommended version: 0.97.5
DON'T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/support/faq
main.cvd is up to date (version: 54, sigs: 1044387, f-level: 60, builder: sven)
daily.cld is up to date (version: 15042, sigs: 218148, f-level: 63, builder: mcichosz)
bytecode.cld is up to date (version: 185, sigs: 39, f-level: 63, builder: neo)

Ah crap, time to touch all the boxes and make sure that the package is up to date right? Nope, not when you manage your boxes with puppet.

Upgrading a Mid-2010 mac mini with a SSD

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 04:01:04 +0000

I was fortunate enough recently to get a fancy pants amazon gift card for some hard work put in the off hours at work. Mainly, 5 tests earning myself 2 certifications and several “specialist” designations over the past 6 months. What did I do with this new gift card, of coarse spend it as soon as I could on something totally geeky.

And here it is, a new OCZ 120GB Solid State drive for the mac mini which is my home dev machine.

[Puppet] Error 400 on SERVER: No support for http method POST

Thu, 24 May 2012 18:36:53 +0000

I’ve been helping a buddy get his puppet master server setup and he recently ran into a rather interesting error. He had his master server setup and had added a few recent server builds to the mix all from the EPEL repository which installed the 2.6.x version of the client.

When adding an older server, he got the following error message showing up in his logs:

Error 400 on SERVER: No support for http method POST

Doing a little googling, it turns out, this is not all that uncommon.

Powershell Error checking

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:36:38 +0000

Being a programmer by trade, I get thrown into many projects that aren’t always my forte, but I can figure them out and get them working the way that I want.

I’ve been messing with powershell for a while now with VMware, but never really getting into big time scripting with it. Its mainly be something to use to accomplish some various tasks on mutliple hosts. Very little error checking in the scripts since I’m watching them was they run. If I want to put them into a scheduled task or automate them from a web page, more error checking is needed.

Puppet Presentation

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:56:13 +0000

For those looking for the slides from the puppet presentation that I gave last week, here they are.

I’ll be working on getting a screen cast of the demo up in the next week or so. Too many other things distracting me at this moment.

Puppet Presentation

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:03:40 +0000

For those that haven’t seen my twitter feed…

I’m going to be doing a presentation in the coming days for the local linux user group (CIALUG) on Puppet from Puppet Labs.

Free pizza and some swag will be thrown around.

The event is 100% free and should hopefully get you acquainted with all the cool stuff you can automate. Signup for your free ticket!

Goal Tracking

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:00:34 +0000

On the 1st of the year, I put our my usual public goals for 2012. I have some typical goals in there of some fitness goals, career type goals and general health goals. Some of these are pretty cut and dry to track progress. I want to run 5 5K races, pretty straight forward.

But how do you track something like getting more sleep?

Here is where Mercury App comes in. I’ve been using this product for over a year now and have mainly been tracking things like my weight and job satisfaction. Adding to it Sleep time, not only how I feel about the sleep I got but actually tracking the number of hours should give me a good overall graph at the end of the year of how well I did in getting that 7+ average that I’m looking for.

Pizza and Puppet

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:00:52 +0000

For those looking to see my handsome mug in person and listen to my beautiful tenor voice, I will be giving a Puppet demonstration at the January 2012 CIALUG meeting. Details on the event can be found on the events page of the cialug.org site.

Puppetlabs has stepped up to offer sponsorship of the event so besides my insightful talk, there will be pizza and t-shirts that will be handed out while supplies last or whatever game we come up with to give them away. I have a whole box of them so hopefully many of you are sporting the latest in puppet wear before the night is through.

vCloud: Org Url Not Found

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:12:19 +0000

We’ve recently been setting up vCloud 1.5 in the office and so far we like what we’ve been seeing. During the install, we did run into a bit of an issue when we set the API urls. On our first attempt we didn’t set them and had issues uploading media. You’d think that the two would be unrelated. You’d first think that you had a permissions issue on the file system somewhere right? Wrong-o-bucko! What you need to do is set the API url in Administration > Public Addresses. Uploading media apparently uses it.

OSX Lion + LiveMeeting

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 03:00:46 +0000

Today marked the first time that I had to attend a live meeting after I recently upgraded my primary workstation to OSX Lion. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the smoothest experience.

Typically, Safari renders these meetings the best so it is my go to browser for meetings. Unfortunately, I would get the prompt for trusting the java app and a window would load with nothing happening. Same with Chrome. Firefox actually rendered the window with a Java loading icon spinning for all its worth, but never actually loading the meeting.

Wrestling with VMware High Availability (HA)

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:00:31 +0000

A few months back I had a little bit of trouble with an upgrade in our corporate VMware cluster that I thought I would share. The details of this upgrade was to add a new host to the mix and bring everything up to vSphere 4.1 update 1. It seemed pretty straight forward at the time but there were a few unexpected issues that sucked up more time than expected.

When to kill a product

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:00:50 +0000

I’ve been out of college now for more than a decade and have worked for only a handful of companies. For a lot of people my generation, I’m probably seen as a dinosaur by not changing jobs every year once my stock options were vested.

But seeing as I’ve had a chance to move up in companies and produce multiple products, I have a different appreciation for product lifespan and code rot.

Time Estimation

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:00:19 +0000

How do you come up with a good time estimate?

If you are a typical employee, there is a good chance that your job revolves not around day to day mundane tasks. There may be some of that, but there is a good chance that it revolves around completing projects. Yes, project oriented work is challenging and rewarding, but often done very poorly.

Not that your work is bad, its the management of the project that we suck at. And more to the point, its the time estimation that we’re the worst at doing.

Moving at the speed of business

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:00:13 +0000

I always laugh when ever someone has a commercial that states moving at the speed of business. I’ve seen the speed of business and its damn slow!

In a previous life, way back when we were first developing our appliances, we shipped on Sun v100 servers. They were cheap boxes that packed quite a bit of power under the hood. Sun had on their site that servers shipped within 3-5 business days.

3 Rules

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:00:05 +0000

There are 3 basic rules to software programming. Most people don’t know them. Or if they do, they probably don’t know how to properly articulate them. So I’m going to spell out the 3 rules for you. This was talked about a lot at my last job early on when dealing with problems and support issues. Just about everything came back to one of these 3 rules, and unfortunately, rule 3 was more popular than even we believed.

Advice: On Call

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 23:03:03 +0000

If you are sick to the point where you are praying to the porcelain throne, you are too sick to be on call. Make sure you get that changed.

BlackBerry ‘Client’ Password

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:30:54 +0000

This is more for the programming geeks out there than anyone else. If you are looking for a quick and dirty way to store your BlackBerry username and password when using the BESUserAdminClient.exe, refer to the following document.

It allows you to simply pass a secondary password that will reference the credentials stored in the registry.

To set the password:

BESUserAdminClient -set_client_auth "-username ADU1 -password ADP1 -ad_auth -domain D1" -set_p password1

To access the credentials from the registry:

Screwing up with class

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:29:59 +0000

Those that know me know I’m a big fan of 37Signals. Heck, I even applied for a job there once upon a time along with several hundred other people.

Over the last week or so they have been having some major issues with their campfire product. And in true 37signals style, they have an explanation and apology all wrapped up in one great blog post.

What’s so great about it?

Well, first off, its honest. There’s no marketing bullshit. No fake apology. Its sincere and straight forward. They had several issues, they laid them out, and took full responsibility for stuff breaking.

Permission to say no

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:46:32 +0000

This was very productive for me at the office. At the beginning of the week, my boss gave us some pretty strict instructions that we needed to focus on getting some projects done. Basically, if it didn’t come directly from him, we were to tell whichever person was requesting our time that they needed to talk to our manager and we couldn’t help them. Simply put, we were getting too distracted by others pulling us into customer support issues.

Wanted: Email Stats Plugin

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:09:38 +0000

As I was doing my best today to not check email and actually program I thought about something that I would be intersted in using. Heck, I might even be willing to pay $5 for something of this nature. The software that I’m looking for is a software plugin for Mail.app that would give me stats on my email activity. Things I’d like to track are:

Number of messages received in a given time period/li>

My Inbox is…better!

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:00:24 +0000

A while ago, I wrote about my Inbox being out of control. I didn’t just bitch about it, I took action. And so far, I’ve done what I would consider a decent job of keeping it clean. I wouldn’t say its A+ work, but I’d give my efforts a B. Ok, maybe C lately with the little one arriving and trying to play catch up.

How have I kept up with the email onslaught:

PowerShell – Failed Host

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:13:27 +0000

I had the opportunity to break out a little powershell today to go grepping for some vi-events. I thought others might get a benefit out of this so here is a little code snippet for you to enjoy.

Our environment is made up of several clusters with multiple hosts in each. One of our hosts happened to die the other day and we wanted to know who was affected to send out an outage report. If you look in the events log, you’ll see a message along the lines of “Virtual Machine was restarted on since failed” Informative and pretty easy to search for. Here’s my code:

2 Things….

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:24:48 +0000

I’ve been really bad about keeping up with various blogs lately. I mean really bad! I’m months behind on several of my favorite blogs. So it should come as no surprise that I’m just now stumbling upon this post which I wanted to chime in on.

I’m not a stranger to stating public goals to here are my two things:

1. What do you want to get better at?

I could go on about a good dozen or so things that I am pretty horrible at. But if I had to narrow down just one thing, I would pin it on its this. I need to be better at going to bed. I know, it sounds really simple doesn’t it. You’re tired, go to bed. But I’m not that guy. Typically my wife will go to bed at 9:30/10 and I’m up still until 12, 1 and this week even 2 a few times. Sometimes it is work related (the 2AMs this week), but often times it is not. Sure dabbling with a side business can do that to you, but its not my main focus. And with a wee one due any day now, I need to get a LOT better at getting my sleep in.

SSH Timeouts

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:00:50 +0000

Do you work in an environment where you bounce through a bunch of firewalls? Do you hang out on idle ssh connections that often times get dropped after a certain amount of idle time? I do and it has always annoyed me. To the point that once I connect to a box that I will be coming back to, I will run top and move on. Well, not anymore. You can set your SSH client to automatically send a bit of data over your connection every X seconds. Here is how it is done for Mac and Linux boxes.

Interruptions

Wed, 12 May 2010 04:43:29 +0000

How often are you interrupted during the day? Do you have the new email notifier turned on? How often is that thing going off? How often are you seeing IMs coming in, both personal and professional? Twitter? facebook? Yup, those too are major enemies to productivity.

You may not have it that bad. Your company may lock down some of the social media services which eliminates a lot of the distractions. For many of us out there we are getting bombarded by interruptions. And as a programmer, it is horrible for productivity.

Priorities

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:35:02 +0000

If it is important enough to you, you will find a way. If it is not, you will find an excuse.

-Unknown

Monit Tricks

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:10:00 +0000

Recently I had a chance to do a little monit foo with a co-worker for a rather interesting project that we will hopefully be sending off into the intertubes.

For one part of this project, I got the chance to get my hands dirty with my old friend monit. Monit, for those that don’t know, is a UNIX system administrators dream.

Here’s a brief run down of what monit can do from the web site:

HMC Resource Management

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:00:32 +0000

Today I’m going to talk about the wonderful thing that is the Resource Manger for HMC (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration), the wondering framework from Microsoft for provisioning users for Exchange, OCS and SharePoint automagically.

Now, we tend to do things a bit differently at my current job. For example, I’m pretty sure I’m the only developer in the US that is hitting HMC (again, a Microsoft product) with PHP hosted on our linux based customer portal. That’s right, the Unix guys is the lead developer hitting a very Microsoft-centric product. Normally this would be done by a .Net developer.

I’m a VMware Certified Professional

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:49:08 +0000

Yes, its true, I passed the test. It wasn’t easy. In fact, I took the test 2 times.

The first time I went into the test I felt fairly confident. I had studied the admin guide and the maximum guides. I had taken the mock exams and done well on those. (Huge thanks for Simon Long and his great site of resources!!!) I thought that I had a fair understanding on how vSphere4 worked. I had taken the class and messed around with it a bit before the test. I wasn’t an vSphere admin day in and day out by any means, but I felt competent that I could successfully perform most tasks. Surely I’d be able to pass the test enough to get by right? WRONG! You really need to know your stuff on this test.

IgniteIT Talk

Thu, 14 May 2009 13:00:57 +0000

About a month ago I gave a lightning talk at a local IgniteIT Event. I haven’t done a lot of public speaking so I was a bit nervous going in. But the people that I was with stated that the talk I gave was pretty good. I assumed they had been drinking heavily so I couldn’t trust them that much.

But now the 5 minute talk is on the intertubes for all to see. So here it is, enjoy.

Great Service!

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:12:53 +0000

A few weeks ago, one of our Public Radio stations here in the state of Iowa was off the air. It was a good week or two that it was out. I had a strong feeling that they knew about the outage, but I figured I would send them a quick note just in case. Here’s the response I got:

Matt —

KUNI suffered a burnout in its transmission line last Saturday. We are currently off the air. We have a tower crew scheduled to arrive on Thursday – if all goes well it may only take a couple of days to repair.

My Inbox is out of control!

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:46:50 +0000

I’ll admit it, I’m an email pack rat. I don’t like being this way, I just am. I’m terrible about deleting emails. I send myself links to read at a later point in time. I often use my inbox as a todo list by sending myself messages of things I need to do. There is a freaking todo list in my email client (Entourage) for goodness sake. I have a backpack account with 37 signals. Good lord, why am I using my inbox as my todo list. This is nuts.

Setting up a silent DNS master server

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:00:42 +0000

Recently, I have begun the process of moving my domains from the DNS servers at my previous employer. They have allowed me to continue hosting my domains there as I still send them a spam feed of unknown addresses from my various domains. Yes spammers, keep that mail coming. Its only doing you good, I promise 😉

The main reason for the change is that the former employer is locking down the admin access to a standard that as a non-employee, I can no longer get to the admin interface. That’s fine, very understandable. So its time to make a change and I decided to go the route of a silent master.