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Posts in Linux
Working around problems with a CentOS 6 kickstart upgrade
Each time I go to deploy a new release of Centos or Fedora I encounter a new "feature" or "change" that breaks configurations that previously worked. I recently encountered several problems upgrading several hosts to FEDORA 16, and this afternooon I encountered another issue while attempting to upgrade several Centos 5 servers to Centos 6. The issue with the CentOS upgrade revolves around changes to the software installation groups. Groups that worked perfectly fine with CentOS 5 no longer work with CentOS 6…
$ read more →Adding a new CentOS or Fedora CD or DVD image to a kickstart server
I've talked in the past about Yum repositories, and how you can create them. If you are using kickstart and want to import the contents of a CD for use by the installer, there are numerous ways you can tackle this issue. One of the easiest methods is to loopback mount the CDs or DVDs and copy them to your kickstart directory hierarchy: You will need to make sure to copy the Packages, repodata and images directories. After the copy completes you can point your kickstart.cfg file at the top level directory of the release you want to install: Posting here so I have this procedure for future reference.
$ read more →Working around various Fedora 16 installation errors
I went to upgrade a few of my lab machines to Fedora 16 today and encountered a number of issues. The first issue I encountered was related to missing "%end" tags in my kickstart configuration file. The specific error was "Section does not end with %end": It appears Fedora now requires the %packages and %post sections to be explicitly ended with an end tag. The kickstart file I was using was from a Fedora 12 installation, and it worked just fine…
$ read more →Configuring wget to use a proxy server
Periodically I need to download files on servers that aren't directly connected to the Internet. If the server has wget installed I will usually execute it passing it the URL of the resource I want to retrieve: If the system resides behind a proxy server the http_proxy variable needs to be set to the server name and port of the proxy: If your proxy requires a username and password you can pass those on the command line: Or you can set the proxy-user and proxy-password variables in your ~/.wgetrc file.
$ read more →Four super cool utilities that are part of the psmisc package
There are a ton of packages available for the various Linux distributions. Some of these packages aren't as well know as others, though they contain some crazy awesome utilities. One package that fits into this cataegory is psmisc. Psmisc contains several tools that be used to print process statistics, look at file descriptor activity, see which process ids have a file or directory open, kill all processes that match a pattern and print the process table as a tree…
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