Archives for sysadmin

PXE virtual network with Virtualbox and Cobbler

A while back I set up a virtual kickstart network with VMware Fusion and Cobbler on my Mac.
But Fusion (unlike VMware server/workstation) made tweaking low-level settings hard, so I’ve switched to  VirtualBox, which is free (for non-commercial/eductional use), has a kick-ass command line interface and much better networking options.
Here’s a revised howto.
why?
I’ll just cover the install [...]

hacking servers to trust your CA

Welcome, Googlers
For the second time this millenium, I’ve had to persuade a server to trust the LDAP server
in the corner. The one with an SSL certificate written in crayon.
Eventually I found a fix – my own, from a few years back, on a mailing list archive (I never got round to restoring my old inbox [...]

PXE testbed with Cobbler and VMware Fusion

UPDATE: unless you’ve got a good reason to want VMWare Fusion, I recommend looking at this post on using Virtualbox to run Cobbler instead.
Something like Puppet could potentially make my life a lot easier.
Puppet can’t do baremetal provisioning; it needs the base OS to be Jumpstart/Kickstarted on first. Fortunately:

Cobbler makes running a kickstart server a [...]