Basic script to create qcow2 backed kvm domains based on a golden domain. Your golden domain must be using qcow2 To install the the dependencies on fedora 19 run the following: yum install libvirt-client qemu-img libguestfs-tools xmlstarlet libxml2 The virt-sysprep tool can do much more than this and I could potentially set the hostname and configure the machine to run some scripts when it starts up to check in with puppet which I may do in the future.

This is a simple VPN for those times when you want the ease of use of a VPN but only have a ssh server available. Both servers need to have ssh configured to allow tunnels. You need to change the configs for ssh under /etc/ssh Remote server sshd_config: PermitTunnel yes Local server ssh_config: Tunnel yes Remote server Setting up the tunnels requires you to use root when sshing.

I recently signed up for a small dedicated server at Kimsufi.co.uk for the grand price of £14 a month which I think is pretty good price for what you get. Brand Intel Model Celeron / Atom Frequency 1.20+ GHz Architecture 64 bits NIC

The txqueuelen is a value in the kernel on network interfaces that sets the transmit queue length. This value can be tuned for different work loads. In the case of modern networking the defaults can sometimes be changed to get better line speeds over ethernet. Most people will do this using a rc.local command to set it on the physical ethX devices like this. vim /etc/rc.local Add the following

Reverting to a previous snapshot has been possible for over a year!!!!! How did I miss that ?? This has for a long time been one of my only real criticisms of LVM and I just discovered that it was quietly committed into the kernel back in 2.6.33 The command used to do the revert is contained within lvconvert. From the lvconvert man page: --merge Merges a snapshot into its origin volume.

I HATE THE CAPS_LOCK KEY!!!! I don’t like it when people send me messages with full caps and I don’t like accidentally pressing it and then sending messages to other people who then think I am yelling at them. It also wastes too much keyboard space and is in an easy place to accidentally hit. Time to get rid of it. The following method is for Fedora 15 but will probably work on other Gnome 3 systems.

This is quite handy to know if you need to create a new network bond on a live system without disrupting traffic. First of all create your bond configs in the normal way so that in the event of a reboot it will come back up working. See the Redhat documentation for how to do it in RHEL6. Now because we cannot just restart the networking to bring that up we need to construct it by hand.

Small script to run a instance of mysql in my home directory using the binary provided by the OS. Maybe some day I will make it more usable but for the time being it suits my needs. #!/bin/bash MYSQL_HOME=$HOME MYSQL_USER=$USER MYSQL_PORT=13306 ACTION=$1 if [ $ACTION == 'init' ]; then echo "initalising new mysql installation at $MYSQL_HOME/var/lib/mysql" rm -rf $MYSQL_HOME/var/lib/mysql mkdir -p $MYSQL_HOME/var/lib/mysql $MYSQL_HOME/mysql/data $HOME/var/lib/mysql/tmp mysql_install_db --user=$MYSQL_USER --datadir=$MYSQL_HOME/var/lib/mysql/data/ cat < $HOME/.my.cnf [mysqld] user=$MYSQL_USER datadir=$MYSQL_HOME/var/lib/mysql/data log-error=mysqld.

Have you ever needed to run a bunch of long running processes from a bash script and get their return codes ? I come across this issue quite frequently in my line of work. The most common one is where i need to run rsync to collect files from many machines then if successful run some other task. Depending on the amount of servers and data this can take several hours to run sequentially and I don’t really like waiting around to check the output so that I can run the next task.

I quite often need to remove a single line from a file by its line number. The most common use case for me is the known_hosts file when I have reinstalled a system, I have in the past used vim and navigated to the line then removed it. This is all well and good but it gets to be a pain having to do it repeatedly, especially when you manage around 1000 servers and the get rebuilt frequently.