Setting a hostname proved to be a PITA. Although setting a hostname shouldn't at all be any difficult, it proved to need some thought.

As I'm managing my workstations with puppet, after provisioning a system when puppetd starts for the very first time, it'll generate a client side certificate based on the hostname at that time. When provisioning systems with either a kickstart based install, regardless of the provisioning being facilitated by cobbler, you'll find that before you reboot the machine, you need to have set the hostname because it's going to use whatever hostname it finds for things like the client side puppet certificate generation.

So how do you set the hostname before or at the first boot? Maybe you can set it via DHCP? It'd be pretty easy to create a named host reservation, fair enough. Maybe, you can have hostnames based on the IP address and let the hostname be set by forward and reverse DNS on whatever IP address the machine gets.

But what happens when none of the above apply? I thought about setting a parameter on the 'boot prompt' command line, but I couldn't find any pre-defined and usable parameters. However, I've not really been investigating if such parameter exists.

You can also set it in the kickstart file, or maybe have a HTTP server generate a kickstart file with a unique hostname. Anyway, here's how I've done it:

When installing the machine, append 'hostname=whatever.host.kanarip.com' at the prompt. Because it starts installing using some kickstart file, %post could do nifty stuff. I'm using this:

%post
CMDLINE=`cat /proc/cmdline`
for cmd in ${CMDLINE}; do
    if [ ! -z "`echo ${cmd} | grep "hostname="`" ]; then
        hostname=`echo ${cmd} | cut -d'=' -f 2`
    fi
done
if [ ! -z "${hostname}" ]; then
    sed -i -e 's/HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain/HOSTNAME=${hostname}/g' /etc/sysconfig/network
    echo "DHCP_HOSTNAME=${hostname}" >> /etc/sysconfig/network
fi

Not only does this set the hostname, but it also explicitly requests the DHCP server what hostname to update in Dynamic DNS. When your network environment runs that crappy 'feels-like-it-should-work' variant of Directory Services including the network bits like DNS and DHCP, you'll find that operating system that should never have been plugged in to the network, unable to 'just update' -even if you set 'Always update A and PTR records for clients even if they do not request it'.

If you have any suggestions, and I suspect you do, feel free to mail me or comment here ;-)

Revisor really kicked some ass. I went to LinuxTag last week, all to show off Revisor to the general public and do some Ambassadors work as well as meet the other Ambassadors from Europe. There were 22 of us in total, including Gerold Kassube, Max Spevack and Mike McGrath.

I never noticed how a Fedora Core release was being presented and how much attention it attracted from any press or the public in general but now that I am so involved it really amazes me to see how much attention it is all getting. Max had guaranteed me that Revisor would be mentioned in like every article about Fedora 7 and every interview he gave, and then I saw this movie:

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/06/01/video-fedora-7-highlights/

Also, since Bob Jensen as the Fedora Unity Lead -you know, the one that puts his ass on the line for a project- had received a Fedora Award 2007 for the great work Fedora Unity did, he ensured me I'd get one send to me as well (also Jonathan Steffan is getting one). That is... Such a great honor! I'm really happy with it, I'll put it somewhere everyone can see it and take pictures and put them online ;-)

I was also invited to the next FUDCon in Raleigh, later this year. At the date I had gotten though I had some other obligations: The RHCE Rapid Course Track including the RH302 Exam. Not too difficult a choice though, right? ;-) I'm gonna work on staying in Raleigh for like another week and then take the RHCE Exam in Raleigh. 

Then, after having Revisor out there, in the open, people started to like it:

This is just one of the most funny banners that had been made (thank you Máirí­n Duffy).

Some more details on what happened at the LinuxTag Fedora 7 announcement speech you can get from Max's blog  

Revisor now has it's own homepage at http://revisor.fedoraunity.org/, and it's own mailing lists. You can find the documentation on Revisor on it's homepage, as well as the feature list , and some screenshots.

We're now developing Revisor to work with Fedora 7, it's anaconda-runtime, yum, pykickstart, system-config-kickstart and pungi have been updated and let me tell you, they changed a lot! For the better, of course ;-)

Revisor has moved to it's final development repository on http://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/revisor. Check out the Timeeline for these past few days... It's been a hell of a week ;-)

I've made a feature list of things we want Revisor to be able to do. Quite a list actually. I'm hoping to get all of this done in time for the release of Fedora 7...

Here's a sneak preview of some of the features of Revisor:

I think it looks nice and we're making great progress, but to get all the work done so that the application can be included in Fedora 7, I've taken the next week off to work on Revisor full-time. You'll probably see more of this soon! ;-)

You can get the original code-base using git: git clone git://git.fedoraproject.org/git/hosted/revisor

Because I'm heavily developing the glade interfaces, I'm temporarily using my own branch, to which I occasionally commit: git clone http://www.kanarip.com/revisor/.git/ should do the trick. I don't really know why you have to append the .git, but then again, it's only temporary, so I'm not interested to figure out how to set up a genuine git branch ;-)

From May 30th untill June 2nd I'll be attending LinuxTag 2007 in the Berlin Expo Center, Germany. I'm excited to once more meet several people from the Fedora community and to check out the rest of the event.

If you are considering to also attend the event, check out the FedoraProject Wiki page on this event. There will also be a FUDCon at which I'm considering to present Revisor, an application enabling users to compose custom installation and live media from yum repositories.

Ik heb dan toch eindelijk weer internet thuis. In totaal ben ik 4 weken en een beetje offline geweest dankzij de verhuizing! Vandaag lag er ook een brief van XS4All in de bus over een nieuwe IP reeks, ik hoop niet dat ze dat door gaan voeren.

Zaterdagochtend (het is nu bevestigd) komt Casema de andere internet verbinding opleveren, dus dan ben ik misschien weer heel even offline om gateways toe te voegen aan het netwerk. 

Zo, en nu ben ik dus ook Fedora Ambassador.

Onder de normale taken van een Fedora Ambassador zijn onder andere het verkondigen van het Fedora gedachtengoed (dit doe ik toch al), en het betrekken van gebruikers bij Fedora. Zowel in de ontwikkeling van Fedora in zijn geheel, als met helpen vertalen van de Release Notes en de documentatie. In deze laatste categorieen kan ik wel wat betekenen, maar ik zet mij vooral in bij het Fedora Unity Project. Ik zal voor Fedora 7 in ieder geval de release notes vertalen!

Fedora Ambassadors daarbij staan vaak op meetings, conferenties en evenementen om daar bij te dragen aan de bekendheid van Fedora. Ik voel me daartoe nog niet zo geroepen, hoewel het natuurlijk hartstikke leuk is. Ik denk dat ik meer kan betekenen in het terugkoppelen van feedback van onze mede-landers; om Fedora beter te ontwikkelen.

Misschien ga ik toch nog naar een eventje of wat ;-)

Groetjes,

Jeroen 

I'm glad to inform you that the Fedora Unity Project in which I participate has released the 20070111 respin of Fedora Core 6.

To download the respin, visit http://torrent.fedoraunity.org/torrents

For more information on the Fedora Unity Project, visit fedoraunity.org  

The servers that are connected to my UPS have been unavailable for quite some time. Why? Because the UPS failed. This is not the first time... I really hate the fact that while it does (or at least it should) protect my computers from main-power failures, and level out the phases, it is in fact 'hanging' and thus not feeding my computers... This 'hanging' happens more often then the main power fails... which is bad, just bad...

I guess I can advise anyone never to try and save money on this kind of infrastructure... These cheap pieces of crap give up on you way too often.

When I'm home, I'll inform you what brand and model number of UPS I have, so that you're warned...

If you want an account on my new test environment (Windows based), drop me a mail. You could be very helpfull ;-) The Windows computers are installed on VMware on elwood.

Finally, it's there. About two years after I certified for LPIC-1, and one year after I certified for LPIC-2, LPI has finally launched LPIC-3. Read more on the LPI website.

ProFTPd does currently not allow write access on pinky.kanarip.com, for reasons unknown to me. I'll need to investigate this as soon as possible, but I'm occupied with other obligations.

Hold on, your home directories will be available via FTP soon (I hope).

 Kind regards,

 Jeroen van Meeuwen

This is a good one ;-) 

So, here's one of them, acting all crazy... :/

Browsing the web, I noticed my old website layout had been archived by webarchive (take a look). I like this layout better then the previous one, so I downloaded the cascaded stylesheet code and HTML from webarchive and put it in my website again ;-)

Now, I also added an administration interface or panel, so I can edit news and other articles, using a WYSIWYG HTML editor. The editor of my choice is TinyMCE, I hope to have a full-featured CMS some day. It'll probably take a very long time ;-)

Also notice that I have changed the MRTG pages... I will be changing them some more the comming few days!