Just a quick post. If you are running kickstart, you may find yourself looking for the list of installation groups and their associated packages. I certainly did.

Following a tip from http://www.mail-archive.com/cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org/msg04644.html, here's the entire comps.xml file for Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

I have been using this script to check for updates on my Redhat systems for quite some time. Put this into your cron.daily, and you have a daily nag to update your system.

#!/bin/bash                                                                                       

#########
## Yum Check Update Script
##
## This script checks for system updates and sends email
## to sysmin team if there are any updates.
##
## Changelog
## ---------
## 24 Oct 2008 (Junhao)
## - Initial commit
##
#########

_CAT="/bin/cat"
_DATE="/bin/date"
_HOSTNAME="/bin/hostname"

Here's another script I did when I had to reorganised a folder hierarchy of years of data. Basically to ensure files are not missing, or corrupted.

#!/bin/bash                                                                                                                              

#########################
#                        
# checkNoMissingFiles    
# ===================    
#                        
# This script checks that no files are missing after folders are reorganised.
# Basic algorithm is to checksum all files in both old and new folders, then 
# checking through both lists of checksums to ensure all checksums are present
# in both lists.

I am currently migrating out of Zimbra to a 3rd-party host. Just for archival, here's my Zimbra backup script. Just run this script using a cronjob every day. There will be a short downtime where Zimbra is shutdown to synchronise the last bit of emails, but that should be okay if you have a backup MX server.

This script creates a working live copy of the Zimbra directory, then shutdown Zimbra to sync the directory. The directory is then passed through star, into a small(er) file.

Recently, I have started to migrate my scripts to use Puppet. Everything from initial system provisioning to manual failover systems had been converted. Wee~

After a long hiatus from blogging, I''m back! The past few months was terrible, rushing from project to project, nary a break in between.

Let's see,
April: implement jumpstart system
May: implement storage system
June: implement backup system
July: data categorisation
Aug: architect new high performance computing cluster and high performance NAS
Sep: meet vendors left-right-centre for market survey for HPCC project
Oct: finalising details of HPCC project
Nov: submit proposal for HPCC project
Dec: data recovery exercise for existing infrastructure

Solaris 10 update 5 is out! Check out the "what's new". Strangely, nothing on ZFS. Oh well...

All the same, download it at the usual place.

Question: What is an IT career all about?

Answer: To be paid to make other people's problem your problem, so that their life will (supposedly) e better. So who fixes the plumber's pipes?

I was at the SUN-NUS Opensource Day on Friday, and after the event, we all adjourned for dinner. You know, when geeks gather, we inevitably will start discussing the hacks we are deploying for one reason or the other. Or thorny problems. And hence, I brought up my "huge dataset" problem.

Now that I am doing cross platform system administration, it is getting critical to have lists of equivalent commands across the *nixes. Found 2 guides so far:

1. Unix toolbox: http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml
2. Tom's Hardware Universal Command Guide: http://www.tomshardware.com/ucg/

Will be adding more as the time goes by.