Bladecenter switches acting funny

Today I had a nice problem. When a second switch was added to the a 3 com uplink switch the network went down. Not so very nice. I fixed it in a not so good way but it gives me a clue were to start looking for the error. I executed the following on both switches.

interface range GigabitEthernet0/17 - 20

spanning-tree portfast trunk

spanning-tree bpdufilter enable

spanning-tree bpduguard enable

!

Basically this means that the switch will not do Spanning tree on its external ports. Do not do this if you are unsure that you have loops or not. In my case I was quite sure so I just did it :) . Probably some 3 com spanning tree protocol that does not talk nice with rapid-pvst

Growl fun on Mac

Growl is a general accepted way of notifying something to users in Mac. You are probably using (for example the twitter app can send you updates via Growl) but what you might not now is that you can easily script. It is quite easy although I haven't figured out the details.

First you need to install the library. You can compile it yourself but you can also easy install it

sudo easy_install-2.6 py-Growl

Then you can test it

>>> import Growl

/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/py_Growl-0.0.7-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/Growl.py:17: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead

>>> gn = Growl.GrowlNotifier("overtime",['overtime'])

>>> gn.register()

>>> gn.notify("overtime","Are you still working?","Yes I am!")

(Code from http://prehensile.co.uk/blog/?p=92)

This should display a message if you have installed Growl

I also created a small script that you run directly from cli if you don't like python. You can run it like this in the terminal

$ ./gnotify "Some Test" "A very good test"

(download)

BTW SQLAlchemy also install easily via easy_install-2.6 on Mac :)

Installing python 26 + sqlalchemy on centos

Turns out there is a very very very easy . Just use the repo for fedora on the redhat site.

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

yum install python26 python26-devel python26-distribute python26-tools

easy_install-2.6 SQLAlchemy

test it via

python2.6

>>>import sqlalchemy

>>>sqlalchemy.__version__

Random password in CLI

Just a small script so that we can generate passwords from the command line

NUMPASS=10

if [[ "$1" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] ; then

NUMPASS=$1

fi

echo "Spicy salt $(date)" | md5sum | sed "s/\(.\{$NUMPASS\}\).*/\1/"

Zimbra server status all red crosses

I always have this problem when configuring zimbra servers (everything is working fine but service have red crosses in the web gui). At this point I tried this and waiting if it will help :)

su - zimbra

zmsshkeygen

zmupdateauthkeys

zmloggerctl stop ; zmloggerctl start

Blueprint script to create DNS records in AD

Create this following code as a bat. You can than run the following (assuming you called the bat adddns.bat):

>adddns mynewhost01 0 10

This will create the records for a host 192.168.0.10 (in the example)

@echo off

:start

if "%1" == "" goto error

if "%2" == "" goto error

if "%3" == "" goto error

dnscmd abinbev.demo /recordadd yourdomain.com %1 A 192.168.%2.%3

dnscmd abinbev.demo /recordadd %2.168.192.in-addr.arpa %3 PTR %1.yourdomain.com

goto end

:error

echo name

echo adddns.bat host1 2 213

goto end

:end

Setting up django: step 1, python 2.7.1

Just trying out some django in centos 5.5. So this should not been seen as a good solution. Just me trying to set it up properly

some pre preps

yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'

yum -y install openssl-devel* zlib*.x86_64

yum -y install httpd-devel

yum -y install mysql-devel

yum -y install wget

downloaded and untarred 2.7.1

cd /usr/local/src

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.1/Python-2.7.1.tgz

tar -xzvf Python-2.7.1.tgz

compiled it with embedded so we can use apache mod wsgi. Used a seperate path so that it is not conflicting with the internal python

./configure --prefix=/opt/python2.7 --with-threads --enable-shared

make

make install

added the new library to the dynamic loader

echo "/opt/python2.7/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/python27.conf

ldconfig

We can now test it

[root@django ld.so.conf.d]# /opt/python2.7/bin/python

Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Mar 1 2011, 21:14:38)

[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-48)] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>>

ln -s /opt/python2.7/bin/python2.7 /usr/bin/python2.7

ln -s /opt/python2.7/lib/libpython2.7.so /usr/lib/libpython2.7.so

Installing the setup tools

cd /usr/local/src

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg

sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg --prefix=/opt/python2.7

Installing the mysql bindings

cd /usr/local/src

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mysql-python/mysql-python/1.2.3/MySQL-python-1.2.3.tar.gz?r=&ts=1299013136&use_mirror=netcologne

tar -xzvf MySQL-python-1.2.3.tar.gz

python2.7 setup.py build

python2.7 setup.py install

Installing wsgi

cd /usr/local/src

wget http://modwsgi.googlecode.com/files/mod_wsgi-3.3.tar.gz

./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/opt/mod_wsgi-3.3 --with-python=/opt/python2.7/bin/python

make

make install

A mod should be made. You can find it in

Libraries have been installed in:

/usr/lib64/httpd/modules

The mod itself:

/usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_wsgi.so

echo "LoadModule wsgi_module /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_wsgi.so" > /etc/httpd/conf.d/wsgi.conf

echo "AddHandler wsgi-script .wsgi" >> /etc/httpd/conf.d/wsgi.conf

chmod 755 /etc/httpd/conf.d/wsgi.conf

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Installing django

wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.2.5/tarball/

python2.7 setup.py install

cd /tmp

cat <<> test.py

#!/opt/python2.7/bin/python

import django

print django.get_version()

EOF

chmod +x test.py

[root@django html]# ./test.py

1.2.5

Symlinking the django admin so we can use it everywhere

ln -s /opt/python2.7/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin/django-admin.py

Configuring apache to use django

cat <<> /etc/httpd/conf.d/django.conf

WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/django/django.wsgi

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

EOF

creating the django handler

mkdir -p /var/www/django

cat <<> /var/www/django/django.wsgi

import os

import sys

path = '/var/www/django'

if path not in sys.path:

sys.path.append(path)

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'mysite.settings'

import django.core.handlers.wsgi

application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

EOF

chmod 755 /var/www/django/django.wsgi

Now we can create a site

cd /var/www/django/

django-admin.py startproject mysite

Restart the webserver to activate everything

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Surf to your http server ot see the result