My good friend Tony asked for a quick HowTo detailing the steps for setting up YUM to use the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora installation disk as a repository. The OS installation disk contains packages that may not have been installed during initial setup that may be needed at a later time. Insert the OS installation disk into the […]

When my homelab grew to several desktops, laptops, and virtual machines it became difficult to remember which IP address I’d given to a particular box. I began passing a hosts file around to each node but this was hard to keep in sync. I realized I was going to need a single place to coordinate […]

The link below points to a Prezi presentation I drafted to champion Ansible automation at my organization. It assumes very little previous knowledge about Ansible and could be used as a gentle ‘first steps’ intro for your admin team before making the deep dive into playbook authoring. https://prezi.com/view/M0ws3yrVg7f1XkWFZlnS/

Ansible is a powerful automation tool for Linux. It operates on the philosophy of anything you can do via SSH you can automate with Ansible. It comes ‘batteries included’ with hundreds of pre-built modules which allow the overwhelmed administrator to accomplish nearly any task across a bevy of remote machines (including Windows machines if necessary). […]

Ansible provides an automated means of performing nearly any administrative function against a list of any number of RHEL or CentOS servers in your managed environment. As with local administration, some tasks, such as viewing a configuration file, require only user level permissions, when other administration tasks, such as user creation, require elevated permissions. Where […]

I’ve added a short bash script that will return the IP address of a running KVM virtual machine. I needed this because I usually ssh into my physical host from a laptop while sitting on my couch and then ssh over into my VMs. This script automates my usual of dumping of the VM’s xml […]

It is possible to configure a RHEL or CentOS server as an iSCSI initiator (a.k.a. client), or as an iSCSI target (a.k.a. server). Typically, a server will be configured as a client to a NAS or SAN device however it is absolutely possible to share a logical volume, partition, or entire disk via iSCSI. Configuring […]

When I had my computer stolen out of my home it wasn’t the machine I missed. My boxes usually have pretty unspectacular specs. I did however miss the data. Even the policy number I needed to give to the insurance company to report the loss was in my Documents directory on a drive in a […]

Keeping all of your server’s installed packages up to date is paramount to system security even if the server is physically isolated from the internet. On an internet-connected server or workstation staying up to date is as easy is issuing the ‘yum update’ or ‘dnf update’ command from a privilege-elevated shell prompt. Updating a RHEL […]

In RHEL7 it is possible to bind two or more network interfaces together to enhance fault-tolerance or to increase throughput. Bonding is the tried and true method for making this happen but teaming, which employs the teamd service provides a new way to aggregate interfaces. Both ways of going about this are valid for the […]