Check it out, my first MOTD:
MOTD Entry for Tue Oct 26 16:19:59 PDT 2004
Tue Oct 26 16:19:59 PDT 2004 -- Apache patched. Apache on our new web
cluster is now patched to guard against a recently-released exploit.
No downtime was incurred with the upgrade, and the exploit wasn't used
against us. -Scott and Augie
The Starbucks Barista Digital Italia Espresso Machine is a marvel of coffee technology … when it works. Unfortunately all this technology is easily thwarted when a small plastic tab on the inside of the door breaks. The system then thinks that the door is not closed (when it is) and no coffee is allowed to be made.
Below are the hacks implemented to make the beast function properly. Note though that I did not actually implement the hacks; I merely documented them.
That’s a butter knife stuck inside the door so that the close door sensor knows the door is actually closed.
The end of a broken plastic fork taped (with electrical tape mind you) to the end of the broken door tab.
The things humans will do for coffee. 
Prompted by Kyle’s presentation at NBLUG on autofs; I decided to try my hand at it.
I figured the perfect task for autofs would be to automatically mount my install CDs when I needed them. For instance, when I want to install software; instead of physically loading the CD into the drive I can just hit “install” and magically have the software loaded and installed.
In a previous entry I showed how easy it was to store your install CDs as ISOs on your hard drive. From there all you need to do is edit a few configuration files to get autofs working for you.
First is /etc/auto.master which is the main configuration file for autofs. I altered the file so that there was only a single non-commented line:
/mnt/iso /etc/auto.iso –timeout=60 .
Now to create the file /etc/auto.iso, which I wrote to look like this:
mdkinstall_1 -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/iso/Mandrake-10.0-install_1.iso
mdkinstall_2 -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/iso/Mandrake-10.0-install_2.iso
mdkinstall_3 -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/iso/Mandrake-10.0-install_3.iso
Now whenever you try to navigate to either /mnt/iso/mdkinstall_1 , /mnt/iso/mdkinstall_2 , or /mnt/iso/mdkinstall_3 the images are automatically mounted for you and you can easily browse them.
In order to make this new magic usable by my software installation tool I updated my software sources to point to file://mnt/iso/mdkinstall_1/Mandrake/RPMS/ , file://mnt/iso/mdkinstall_2/Mandrake/RPMS2/ , and file://mnt/iso/mdkinstall_3/Mandrake/RPMS3 for “Installation CD 1″, “installation CD 2″, and “Installation CD 3″ respectively.
Now when I want to install software from the installation CDs I just fire up my install tool, select the software I want and go; no wasting time loading CDs into the tray, or even taking the time to mount the images anymore. Life is good.
I installed my newly downloaded and burned Mandrake 10.0 CDs at work today, and I wanted to update my software to get all the security updates and bug fixes. However when I tried to install the updated software I received the error that the packages I was trying to install had bad signatures.
Package signatures are a way for the users to verify that the software they are about to install has not been changed since the original developers released it. A bad signature on a package can be caused by the package being corrupted, the package being compromised by some evil doer, but the most common reason is that you don’t have the public key required to verify the package signature. In my case I had the wrong keys.
You can see what keys you have available via the command line with:
rpm -qa gpg-pubkey .
The key can be displayed on the command line with:
rpm -qi gpg-pubkey-XXXXXXXX .
Where XXXXXXXX is the key-id.
I found that these keys differed from the ones in /etc/RPM-GPG-KEYS/
After removing the old keys:
rpm -e rpm -e gpg-pubkey-22458a98-3969e7de … .
I imported the new keys:
rpm –import /etc/RPM-GPG-KEYS/*.asc .
And all was well. Now I can install packages from Mandrake and not have to worry about the dreaded bad signatures error.
* Sources: This link helped me get going.
I was tired of burning copies of Linux distribution CDs only to throw them away when the next revision came around. With copies for home, and copies for work it gets to be pretty wasteful. So I decided to take my latest Mandrake 9.2 CDs and create ISO images from them which I could then store on my hard drive. Once the ISO image is on your hard drive you can mount it like any other file system and use it.
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A brief how-to for using the urpmi utility to update your linux servers/workstations much more easily.
I wrote up some documentation for some things I’ve been working on at work. If you’ve ever wondered what it is Augie does at work, read the following to get a glimpse.
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