Michael Osburn

Note to self

mosburn — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:45:26 +0000

If you are using the proxy feature in nginx and am working on valid_referers rule, you need to make sure you have the proxy lines copied into the valid_referers lines.

Public Scripts Repository

mosburn — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:14:03 +0000

I have created a public git repository on github for all of my public scripts. Feel free to clone/branch/etc this repository and send in any patches for review. As this is a new repo, it will be growing as many more scripts are added.

To clone it and automatically add this repository to your path, run this command:

git clone git://github.com/mosburn/public-scripts.git cd public-scripts ./setup_pubscripts

Read the file Scripts.Desc for information on the scripts.

Enjoy!

Making Ubuntu play nice with libdbd-oracle-perl

mosburn — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:35:45 +0000

I started working on some new perl scripts and realized that i have not installed the libdbd-oracle-perl package on my desktop since the upgrade. If anyone is looking for how to do this on a Ubuntu Maverick machine ( I know, right before 11.04 comes out but it still worked in the alpha ).

First go to Oracle’s website and grab the rpm instant-client packages for the database that you are going to be connecting to and convert them to .deb before installing them. This needs to be done or building libdbd-oracle-perl will fail. Save these off to a temp directory that we will be using for this build:

mkdir -p ~/src/libdbd-oracle-perl
cd ~/src/libdbd-oracle-perl
sudo alien oracle-instantclient-devel-10.2.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo alien oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo alien oracle-instantclient-sqlplus-10.2.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo dpkg -i oracle-instantclient-*.deb

Download the latest source packages from launchpad here or if your lucky you can use apt-get source from the ~/src/libdbd-oracle-perl directory:

apt-get source libdbd-oracle-perl

Either way you get them, you will end up with these three packages:

libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21.orig.tar.gz
libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21-2.diff.gz
libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21-2.dsc

Next, install some package building tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev alien

Finally build us a .deb of libdbd-oracle-perl:

dpkg -i libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21-3_amd64.deb

If you want to test to see that it has registered you can run this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use DBD::Oracle;
print $DBD::Oracle::VERSION,"\n";'

MPD with Pulse Audio on Ubuntu

mosburn — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:19:27 +0000

I have been using MPD for a number of years and have always found it to be reliable. Upon installing it on an ubuntu netbook I discovered a very annoying issue, any other sound causes the default MPD configuration file tends to choke out if another application plays a sound. This does not happen right away, but rather it queues up all the other audio and when loading a new playlist blasts out the queue before locking MPD out of the sound system for a random amount of time. The following fixes that issue and allows you to have multiple sound sources playing at once (pidgin notifications, alarms, etc). Simply edit /etc/mpd.conf and add in the following section before restarting mpd.

audio_output {
   type "pulse"
   name "MPD on localhost"
}

Personal Infrastructure Changes

mosburn — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:04:14 +0000

After being out of the sysadmin specific position for over a year now, I decided to start building out my lab again and dusting off my skill set. This also comes at a time that I am in the process of designing a new media center solution for a family member. I remember playing around with cfengine and puppet in the labs at a former employer and decided to automate as much of it as I can. After playing with it for a few months now I have come to the following conclusions.

1.) Puppet is really cool
2.) I was doing it all wrong.
3.) Starting from scratch again taught me more about how to design it better then letting it grow organically.
4.) I am still doing it only slightly less wrong then I was in step 2.
5.) I have much to learn but have progressed far.

My original subversion repository for puppet had well over a thousand commits and since doing a major cleanup and restart I am sitting at just shy of 80 with much better results. Over this weekend I am planning on reading the best practices document and start to implement them into a personal install guide.