Ubuntu unattended updates with Ansible
Learn to automate patches and reboots on Ubuntu using Ansible
Ubuntu to CentOS rsync errors with chgrp Operation not permitted (1)
When running rsync to backup from a ZFS volume on my primary Ubuntu server to a backup server running Centos I was getting non-fatal errors like this: rsync: chgrp “/DISK2_BACKUP/mnt/share4/vmshare/” failed: Operation not permitted (1) My rsync commandlines have the following format: rsync -avr –delete –progress /DISK2/vmshare/ /mnt/share4/vmshare/ The key flag in that commandline is […]
SCCM 2012 agent reboots when MSIEXEC uses REALLYSUPPRESS switch
I recently discovered some rather worrying behaviour in SCCM 2012 SP1 regarding how the CM agent handles return codes from msiexec. If you pass the /REALLYSUPPRESS switch to msixec then that means that if msixec determines that the installation needs a reboot (for example, if a required file was in use during the install/upgrade) then […]
New Outlook web mail: Migrating from Hotmail
As reported on Lifehacker, Microsoft have released Outlook as a sort of successor to hotmail. The link for the new service is at:http://outlook.com If, like me, you were wondering if you can migrate your existing hotmail account to the new system/interface then the answer is ‘yes.’ There are two methods that i know of: 1. […]
Uninstalling the SMTP service in Windows Server 2008
Uninstalling the SMTP service in Windows Server 2008 I had previously installed a third party SMTP application (MailEnable) on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. However, I then decided to remove it and install Microsoft Exchange 2010 instead.Unfortunately, the SMTP service component gets left behind and causes the Exchange installer pre-requisite checker to fail saying that […]
ZFS and ZFS-FUSE
ZFS is touted as the uber-filesystem.There are plenty of guides to ZFS that can be found by googling and for that reason I’m going to keep ZFS-specific talk to a minimum, focusing on ZFS in FUSE (zfs-fuse).See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS for a primer on ZFS. ZFS has a number of components but the higher-level ones that are […]
Installing and configuring Openssh on Ubuntu 10.04 (and windows client setup)
The first service that I wanted running on my server (Ubuntu 10.04) is ssh. It makes administration much easier and allows me to run the server headless and administrate it securely from my Windows 7 machine.SERVER-SIDEFirst you will need to install the openssh server: sudo apt-get install openssh-server Then you’ll want to stop the service […]
Installing Ubuntu 10.04 and zfs-fuse
Upgrading from Ubuntu Server 9.10 to 10.04 proved less than smooth. As a result I ended up doing a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04.Prior to the upgrade attempt I made sure that both my ZFS zpools (‘DISk1’ and ‘DISK2’) were safely exported using the export command: sudo zpool export DISK1 sudo zpool export DISK2 For […]