I’ve had some free time and a desire to break stuff on my network at home. I wanted to fix my home network’s topology to more correctly split up my wired (DHCP), wireless (DHCP) and server (statically-configured) subnets. At a high level, I had to create a server subnet, create vlan’s on my layer-3 switch for each of those pervious subnets, then I had to move the network interfaces on my VM host around to only connect to the networks I wanted it to (wired and server). ...

In my initial post about unattended Ubuntu installs, I made the less-automated choice of hacking at the Ubuntu installation ISO and baking my preseed configuration right into the ISO. This proved to be incredibly inefficient and prevented a lot of the customization and quick-spin-up potential of what I interested in. In other words, if I wanted to spin up five identical VMs differing only by their hostname, was I really expected to bake five custom ISO’s whose preseed file only differed by their specification of the hostname? ...

In my day job, it’s all about automation. Automate what is repeatable, and move on to more interesting and not-yet-automated tasks. For a while, I’ve run a KVM/libvirt setup at home, running various iterations and distributions of Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD for various pet projects. Going through each distribution’s install procedure was getting old, requiring me to input the same parameters, set up the same users and passwords, over and over again. Given I use Ubuntu mostly as a VM guest, I dug into their preseed infrastructure, to be able to automate the installation and get me past the drudgery of adding another VM. Below are the steps and a bit of sample configuration that got me through the process. ...

After several years of mindlessly running Ubuntu on the desktop, I am attempting to dive (back) into running FreeBSD on the desktop. Considering that the majority of applications I use on the desktop are a browser (Firefox/Chrome), an ssh terminal, and Rhythmbox, how hard could this be? Some of the hurdles Given I still wanted to keep Ubuntu around and not redefine my default setup, I kept Grub2 as my bootloader on the MBR. I still needed a way to boot into FreeBSD at-will. I had installed FreeBSD on hd0a. Grub2 from Ubuntu makes finding the FreeBSD boot files incredibly easy: ...

A while back I blogged about how I hooked up Nagios and Git to run the Nagios preflight checks before restarting with a new checkin’s worth of configs. But the more I looked at how it all fit together, the more I knew it could be improved. A sed hack, expecting a certain pattern in the nagios.cfg? Bad bad bad. Most of the improvement revolves around Nagios’s ability to reference relative paths for its config files. Given the path of the ‘main’ nagios.cfg file, you can then reference directories that contain your services, hosts, and other custom commands, in relation to that main file. With this functionality I significantly improved the Git->Nagios pipeline. ...