Randy Saeks has posted a paper on integrating Open Directory with Google Apps. It’s a nice read and takes a lot of the guessing game out of getting Google Apps to authenticate users based on Open Directory. Many of the steps can also be leveraged to use the GoogleAppsToolkit for LDAP running on other platforms as well.
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Deploy EC2 En Masse
Render farms, cluster nodes and other types of distributed computing often require using a lot of machines that don’t have a lot of stuff running on them and are only needed during certain times. Such is the life of a compute cluster, which is what EC2 is there for. Because cluster nodes are so homogenous by nature you can deploy them en masse. Picking up where I left off with deploying EC2 via the command line we’re going to look at spinning up let’s say 100 virtual machines with the large designation, from a pricing standpoint. As with the previous example, we’re going to use ami-767676 (although you’ll more than…
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Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud
Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…
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Automatic Script Updates
Yesterday I posted about Randomizing the Software Update Server for Mac OS X. I posted the script, which I called randomsus.sh at https://krypted.com//Scripts/randomsus.sh. But, what if you wanted to update the Software Update Server list in the script automatically using your own URL (ie – on a timed interval)? In this case, you could simply use the following script, which pulls a new copy of the randomsus.sh script from the site: #!/bin/bash URL=”https://krypted.com//Scripts/randomsus.sh” PATH=”/Scripts/randomsus.sh” /usr/bin/curl $URL > $PATH exit 0 Notice that I made the URL and PATH variables. This is really just to make it easier to use if others choose to do so. It would also be pretty…
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CPAN
Getting through all of the dependencies for certain Perl modules can be hairy. To give you a sense of how complex perl can be, here’s a small fact: CPAN has over nine thousand perl modules listed. Keeping track of module dependencies can be a real pain. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution…CPAN.pm CPAN.pm is a PERL module that automates the whole process of downloading, unpacking, compiling and packaging modules. For example, if I wanted to install a module called Colors::Yellow, I would type: perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Colors::Yellow’ That’s it. The CPAN.pm would automatically figure dependancies, download the appropriate modules, and install them. If you want more information on using the…
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Finding Disk Speeds on a NetApp
On a NetApp you can determine the disk speeds for drives in your Filer using the following command: storage show disk –a This will show all of the disks. Each disk has a unique identifier within the NetApp, indicated by a numeric sequence typically starting with a 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, etc. You can obtain detailed information about each disk by showing disk with the unique identifier in the command. You can also see a listing of disks by volume using the following command (they will appear in the RPM column): vol status -r This will show a variety of statistics, including the disk type, speed, etc. The vol command…
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Using Dates in Shell Scripts
At a terminal prompt, it is really straight forward to grab the date, simply use the date command, with no arguments and you will get something similar to the following, including the day, date, time (with seconds), time zone and year: Tue Apr 15 00:40:07 CDT 2009 In a script this can choose fairly challenging, especially in cases where you just need the date stamp without the time and time zone, etc. Here we’re going to grab the current system date from ESX, OS X or Linux (or whatever OSen really) and then use a variable, currentdate, to put that date, formatted into a pretty standard format, YYYYMMDD: currentdate=`date ”+%c%m%d”…
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NetApp Failovers
Each controller of a NetApp FAS will typically have two network interfaces. Provided I have two storage controllers (and I usually do) I typically prefer to setup a NetApp in an automated failover scenario. A NetApp active/active configuration consists of two storage nodes) whose controllers are connected to each other either directly or through switches. The nodes are connected through a cluster adapter or an NVRAM adapter, which allows one node to serve data to the disks of its failed partner node. Each node continually monitors its partner, mirroring the data for each other’s nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM). Before configuring the filers for an active/active clustered failover, first verify that the…
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The NetApp Halt Command
When shutting down a NetApp Filer, you should use the halt command. The halt command flushes file system updates (eg – flushing memory to disk) out to disks and clears NVRAM, which helps to make sure the system comes back online properly and no data is lost during the process (’cause you know, data loss is kinda’ bad on your storage devices, right). Flags that can be used with the halt command include -d, -t and -f, which sets a dump string (dirty shut down, only use this if a standard shutdown doesn’t work), an interval for the shutdown to occur (in minutes) and prevents other node from taking over…
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Apropos and OS X
The apropos command is used to search for strings in the whatis database. The whatis database is compiled by the makewhatis command, which searches for names and descriptions of all the man pages from a directory you specify as part of the command (optionally, or just defaults to /usr/share/man) and throws them into the database. Apropos then searches these strings and lists a short descriptor. If you’re thinking that I shouldn’t be lazy and I should remember every single command in Mac OS X, well, while I’d love to, but I have to point out that there are a lot of them… Also, I’ve learned that there are some very…