Chronophage's Blog

Elastic Sky X. That’s what ESX stands for. Crazy, right?

Well, more playing means more caveats

First, something I forgot to mention yesterday. To get ESX working in Ubuntu, Workstation needs to be able to put the vmnet interfaces into promiscuous mode. That requires allowing the user or group that you use to start Workstation to have read/write permissions over the vmnet devices in /dev. A simple chmod will do the trick.

Now, back to our story…

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Requirements:
VMware vSphere, lots of RAM, a decent amount of disk space, a fairly recent copy of 64bit Windows (I used Server 2008 R2) ESX and vSphere Server iso and exe files. Iron will. Patience. Some sort of NAS distribution (I used FreeNAS.)

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[Originally Appeared 02/04/2010 blogs.iphouse.net]

One of the many terms you’ll hear thrown around an internet service provider is Request For Comments, aka, RFC: “This isn’t per the RFC!” or “We follow the RFC!” or “Read the RFC!” So what is an RFC, and why do you want to know what it says.

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I recently read an article explaining why FreeBSD was not more popular. The conclusion of said article was that the installer was daunting, and archaic, and that it was too intimidating to utilize. So, basically, whoever wrote this article (I don’t like calling professionals out) didn’t get past installing the operating system. He assumes, that once it’s up and running, it’s the same as Linux. Nothing about the Ports system, nothing about administration. The sum total of his experience was that that installer was intimidating. He went on to state, and I am paraphrasing here, that only old, wizened Unix admins would use FreeBSD, sitting on high from their ivory corner of the office, replete with Star Trek posters, and choice snippets of their homemade 1994 BoFH day-by-day calendars strewn about their desks,  as they are the only ones who would defend such a terrible installer. This is the type that would utilize an operating system that requires disk slices and network configuration. The rest of us “modern” geeks don’t want to bother with such incantations, abjurations and divinations. They just want an operating system that works out of the box. Point-and-click-and-go!

Well, that tells me that you don’t get it. I’m not wasting my time with my installer. You’re wasting your time with yours. And with your point-and-click Linux install, you’ve installed an “operating system” dedicated to wasting time.

It’s all about the futz factor. And you just declared “I live to futz!”

<Here comes the biography>

I am not a wizened UNIX admin. I’m a Macintosh kid. I grew up with GUI objects, and hypercard. I thought that the most efficient way to work with a computer was with a graphic interface. I did some work with DOS, and frankly, thought it archaic, and backwards. Setting base pages for memory, batch scripting, who needed it?

My first experience with UN*X was MKLinux on a Mac LC (the pizza box) I futzed and futzed with it until I got it to boot. No idea what to do with it. 2 years later, my uncle gave me a PII 200Mhz and I put Mandrake Linux on it, to use it as a NAT’ing router and I thought: Cool! Windows sneaked into my life in my late teens, as I could not resist the lure of Counterstrike, Duke Nuke’m and Quake. Still, I enjoyed futzing with Linux. Breaking things, trying to figure out how they were put together, tinker tinker tinker.

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Certain…Parties… Have intoned I am  goofy for implementing weird “mail bouncy thing” that is sometimes frustrating and is a silly anti-spam technique. Well, that would be Greylisting, and while it’s weird, it also drops a lot of spam getting through.

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Very cool for dinking around, PBX in a Flash installs CentOS, Asterisk and FreePBX all in one go, with a couple of extra scripts. It definitely shallows the learning curve of Asterisk. I basically followed this Nerdvittles tutorial, and now I’ve been setting up Queues, IVRs and Voicemail. I still can’t figure out how to get someone to log into a Queue… Oh well. Very fun.

Hey, it works! I’m moving a file (on a GIG-E switch between VLANs) at around 3MBps.

Thanks to http://linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.com/2008/09/howto-setup-nfs-server-on-freebsd.html

This is a live and learn moment. When I did my last update, I had a lot of old libraries hanging around. I thought that portupgrade would recompile all of my ports, but it didn’t. Most had been recompiled in the interim as I had been upgrading, but Apache, well, Apache upgrades are hardly for the weak. So, when I deleted a bunch of crud laying around. I broke SUEXEC. SUEXEC is what allows scripts to be executed under my various users’ home directories. Well, a recompile and reinstall, and things are working much much faster. Always fix your architecture kids.

I’ve decided to get my learn on, so I’m going through Juniper and Cisco training material. It’s fun, actually. Juniper certs are free, for now, so I’m starting there. Most of their material seems to compare JunOS to IOS anyways so it’s a two for one. Now to get a lab going…

So I needed a quick script to query a billing database for DSL users. The user names, of course where horribly inconsistent. I had to use a program that executed a query of the database, as I didn’t have access to the actual database. Oh, and I didn’t know any Perl at the time.

Now, I have a bad habit when writing code for myself, to use ambiguous variable names, and strange loop structures, and no comments. See if you can figure out what’s going on.

Oh, I vow never to write code like this again.

#!/bin/bash

echo Audit run on $( date )
echo Audit run on $( date ) > notinbilldb.txt
echo
echo

for i in $( cat radiusdump.txt | awk '{print $1}' ); do
 	t2=""
	t2=$( echo $i | sed -e 's/@.*$//;' | cut -f1 -d . )
	t1=$( billdb -s $t2 | grep DSL | awk '{print $3}' | sed -e 's/.dsl//; s/^dsl//;s/@.*$//;' )
  	t3="0"
	t4="0"
	t5="0"
	t6=""

	if [ "$t1" = "" ]; then
		t1=$( billdb -s $i | grep Email | awk '{print $3}' | sed -e 's/@.*$//;' )
		t5="1"
	fi

	if [ "$t1" = "" ]; then
		echo $i is not in billdb.
		echo $i is not in billdb. >> notinbilldb.txt
		t4="1"
	fi
	p=$( echo $i | sed -e 's/.dsl//; s/^dsl//;s/@.*$//;' )
	k=""

	for k in $( echo $t1 ); do
		if [ "$p" = "$k" ]; then
			if [ "$t5" = "1" ]; then
				t6=", but only in email"
			fi
			echo $i matched $k in billdb$t6.

			t3="1"
	 	fi
	done
	if [ "$t4" = "$t3" ]; then
		echo $i is really not in billdb but was close to $t1.
        	echo $i is really not in billdb but was close to $t1. >> notinbilldb.txt
	fi
	echo --------------------------------
	echo
done
echo
echo Audit completed $( date )
echo