A Poutpourri and the GFC.

It’s felt like a long week so far but I must admit I’m faring better than some – I’m looking over resumes for friends at the moment ( I think I’ve seen more skill matrices than shell prompts today!) who’ve lost work over the past few weeks due to the GFC – redundancies and in one case a business owner who took it as an opportunity to sell up and give his entire staff a week’s notice! If the financial crisis has left you out of work, keep your chin up and don’t lose hope.

I feel that between Bacula’s rotation and volume management keeping me on my toes (tip to the new – RTFM twice, then it makes perfect sense), slavery involving OpenLDAP and MySQL (I should consider Fedora Directory Server and DRBD for master-master replication, but first things first..) and Puppet configuration management (manna from heaven for an admin’s sanity especially if you have more than a handful of servers) I’ve achieved something so far this week. ?

Regarding the latter package I’ll put up any useful facts/recipes I write up that work – you have my word. Reductivelabs have a number, but there’s a few omissions that I and perhaps some of you may find handy.

Building some Ruby gems has not been so successful, and if anyone has been successful in rebuilding RPMs of hpricot / json gems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux I’d be interested in your tale.

I’ve mitigated (fixed is the wrong word) my Koji issues, but not in the way I’d like. ? At least I have more information  to work with and things are running in the meantime.

Dan Walsh’s post on confining services through SELinux is definitely getting printed and stuck on my workmates’ noticeboard. I’ve seen a lot of instances where SELinux is switched off instead of thought through and used correctly, which is unfortunate so anything that encourages changes in that behaviour that is a plus :-). It’s not voodoo and it won’t eat your brane, so especially if you have services is sensitive / “wild side” areas the time taken to learn it will be well spent.

Now to sort out those WSGI socket AVC’s of mine… ?