PerlStalker's SysAdmin Notes

I use XFCE4 on my box at work because it's lightweight and still provide the features I want. I wanted to change the default font so that emacs used the font I wanted without having to change my .emacs file. Unfortunately, XFCE4 only lets you set system default but not the monospace font. Fortunately, XFCE4 uses fontconfig. All you need to do is edit $HOME/.fonts.conf and this little XML snippet. (See the fonts.conf manpage.)

I use emacs for a lot of things at work. One of the more useful is org-mode for to do lists, scheduling and meeting notes. Org-mode can sync to mobile devices running the app MobileOrg. Unfortunately, that sync is a manual process. The good news, emacs is scriptable and can be run in batch mode to automate things. Here are a couple of things I use.

Note: Emacs batch mode spews a huge amount of crap to stderr. If you're putting these in cron, you may want to slap a 2>/dev/null on there to keep it quiet.

Following up on a previous post discussing finding old user accounts in Active Directory, here's how you find old computer accounts.

Have you ever had the situation where you had a parent class but you find out later in the code that you really want a subclass. With perl Moose, it's really easy to do.

I'm hacking on a new tool in perl to manage my KVM cluster. Part of it is a RESTful interface using JSON. The objects I'm using are written using Moose and MooseX::Storable to simplify serialization. I can convert objects back and forth between perl objects and JSON all day. Unfortunately, there's a fly in the ointment.

I needed to roll a couple of debs for my Ubuntu servers at work. Since I run Gentoo on my desktop, I rolled a 64-bit Lucid VM. Unfortunately, after the install finished, I got the following error on the console and the VM wouldn't boot.

I figured the problem had something to do with the interaction with spice console (which I'm using instead of VNC). Fortunately, the fix is pretty easy.

The good thing about being stuck in an airport waiting for a plane that's been delayed for an hour is that I finally get around to writing a post on actually using Chrome OS. If you'll recall, Google shipped me a Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook to play with. After some initial problems with the hardware of the first one, Google sent me a replacement. I've been using it as my main machine at home since.

Ok, I have to get this off my chest because, 1) it drives me fracking bonkers everytime and see it and 2) I want a place I can point people at when they ask why this is a bad idea. What I'm talking about is the excessive number of HOWTOs that think it's a good idea to use the same home directory for all virtual users. Most of these HOWTOs discuss using postfix with courier, but I have seen courier-mta HOWTOs that do this too.

I've been putting off dealing with a problem at work for a while and I finally worked out a way to deal with it. At work, when a faculty or staff member leaves, we don't delete the account right away. Instead, the account is disabled. It's sort of a CYA policy. It came in useful today, in fact, when I was told that the professor whose account I disabled a couple of days ago was actually granted emeritus status and so his account needed to hang around a while more.

I'm getting ready to deploy a pair of Server 2008 Active Directory servers to replace a couple of old 2003 boxes. In preparing those servers, I installed the remote agent for Microsoft Data Protection Manager before I installed the ADDS role and promoting the new AD servers. That turned out to be a mistake.