Ages ago (it seems) I posted a howto on configure NFS using Puppet and Hiera. I have been using this happily for several months and adding a new share was is as simple as adding a line to a YAML file. I was never completely happy with it though, especially after I decided to deploy The Foreman in my lab. The reason I was never satisfied is because The Foreman makes a really good ENC.

Yesterday saw probably the biggest FLOSS news in recent times. Certainly the biggest news of 2014 so far :-) By some freak of overloaded RSS readers, I missed the announcement, but I did see this: Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL That is important! This says to me that Red Hat see the value of CentOS as an entity in itself. By not linking the CentOS developers to RHEL in anyway, they are not going to be side-tracking them.

I had a request on Reddit to share a document I wrote about connect Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Active Directory. The original document I wrote is confidential, but I said I would write it up. This works for both Server 2008(R2) and 2012. If I recall correctly it will also work with 2003, but may need to minor terminology changes on the Windows side. From the Linux side, it should be fine with RHEL 6 and similar (CentOS and Scientific Linux).

{% img right /images/NetappClustering.jpg %}That is a pretty drastic title, especially given that I spend a significant part of my day job working with EMC storage arrays. The other day I replied to a tweet by Scott Lowe : The boundary between DAS (Direct Attached Storage) and remote storage (be that a SAN or NAS) is blurring. Traditionally a SAN/NAS array is a proprietary box that gives you bits of disk space that is available to whatever server (or servers) that you want.

Okay, I know I am little slow on the uptake here, but I was on holiday at the time. The announcement of Virtual SAN at VMWorld the last week got me thinking a bit. Very briefly, Virtual SAN takes locally attached storage on you hypervisors. It then turns it into a distributed object storage system which you can use to store your VMDKs. Plenty of other people have gone into a lot more detail.

This is a post which breaks from the normal subjects of Linux and storage. Today I am going to share a very simple recipe for what I drink when I am cycling. I have some fairly simple requirements for this. 1. It must work (it must rehydrate me effectively) 1. It must not be a rip off 1. I want to have a at least a reasonable idea of what is in it.

{% img right https://www.hastexo.com/system/files/imagecache/sidebar/20120221105324808-f2df3ea3e3aeab8\_250\_0.png %} As I promised on Twitter, this is how I automate a GlusterFS deployment. I'm making a few assumptions here: I am using CentOS 6, so should work on RHEL 6 and Scientific Linux 6 too. Others may work, but YMMV. As I use XFS, RHEL users will need the Scalable Storage option. Ext4 will work, but XFS is recommended. That you have a way of automating your base OS installation.

Dell has announced the new PowerEdge VRTX (pronounced Vertex). The name comes from a vertex being “the intersection of multiple lines”, alluding to this being a mixture of a rack server, a blade server and a SAN. It is aimed at branch offices, so it contains 4 servers, storage, networking and (unusually) the ability to add PCI-e cards (up to 8, including 3 FH/FL). These cards can be connected to which ever server you want.

I have been a little slow on the uptake on this one. I would like to say it is because I was carefully digesting the information, but that is not true; the reality is that I have just had 2 5 day weekends in 2 weeks :-). The big announcement at this years EMC World is ViPR. Plenty of people with far bigger reputations than me in the industry have already made their comments:

BambooInvoice is free Open Source invoicing software intended for small businesses and independent contractors. It is easy to use and creates pretty good looking invoices. It is a simple PHP application that is based on the CodeIgniter framework. This means it is really simple to install on a typically LAMP stack. I however use Nginx and could not find any notes on how to configure it. It is pretty typical you can get most of the way by reading any of the Nginx howto documents on the web.