With the release of VMWare Fusion 4 (and its CONTINUED lack of GUI for network manager), I bring you the instructions on how to add networks to VMWare Fusion 4 (now that I can write about it).
In good news, you no longer have to fully restart the network stack via boot.sh, just restarting Fusion will dynamically pick up the changes
As many of you know I am a very big proponent of using the cloud with high automation. At my job we do this in a big way. However, one question always comes to mind, if you share your servers with other physical machines; how can one guarantee security?
In short you can’t, but there are things you can do.
I have 6to6 capability at my house, yet I had noticed the lynch pin in fast 6to6 browsing in local dns resolution. I have an Airport Extreme, but it refuses to hand out public DNS servers which I put it in, and it runs its own version of the dscaching daemon built into OSX. This daemon in OSX works as intended, but on the ABES 6to6 resolution can take over 15 seconds. Doing directly lookups by forcing external native v4 and v6 DNS servers in my Mac’s DNS server configuration (airport in this case), eliminates the problem.
All the Googling I have done shows there is no way to force the ABES to give out designated DNS servers via DHCP and for it NOT to handle DHCP (but to do 4to6 and 4to4 NAT). This is a pitty and something Apple should address, or get its resolver more IPv6 savvy.
We all have heard quite a bit about IANA running out of IPv4 addresses. While it will be a while until the affects are fully felt, I am doing my part and adding AAAA records to my website. IPv6 is the future whether we are ready or not, there is no time like the present to start thinking about it.
Puppet is an amazing configuration management system as I have previously written, but one downfall is that no system exists where you check in code, it runs, and if it fails, it alerts. Continuous Integration is a very important thing to have. It saves dev and production environments from being destroyed or otherwise screwed up. After searching all over the web, I was unable to find anyone who has done a full CI system for puppet, so I developed my own.
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I wrote a Perl script which is used in combination with cron to make sure that puppet clients don’t stray too far from their master. The script can be found here and is available under the GPL v3.
This problem has come up a couple times and I figured out how to do it. It isn’t a pretty thing to do, but it works.
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Well it sounds simple doesn’t it? Cisco says you reload the OS, you make a couple changes and voila, you have a working Pix 515 running the latest and greatest code (which by the way is the same code those ASA’s run which cost quite a bit more). Well, not so fast. Read the rest of this entry »
What an odd title? What has to deal with puppets and system administration? Well, in fact there is a program called puppet. What is puppet? Puppet is a client/server software system put out by Reductive Labs which allows for simplistic management of *Nix (OS X included).
Wow, I certainly have not updated this in forever. I should get back to this, most likely with a better theme soon. I need to update the resume as well. Stay tuned…