Identity Management with IPA Part I

Red Hat released RHEL 6.2 on December 6th. From my point of view, the greatest news in the release is that IPA (or now called Identity Management) is now fully supported and available in the RHEL 6 base channel without additional subscription costs. Upstream project is freeIPA and is available trough the default Fedora repos. About central Identity Management IPA stands for Identification, Auditing, Policy. The focus in this article is on identification of users. In the past, there have ….Read More

Implement a high available Cobbler provisioning system

A not so well known feature of Cobbler is its replication facility. It allows you to create a high available system provisioning system. The whole set up is straight forward. Background Today people tend to NOT backup systems, only data is being backed up. In the case of a system failure, they just re-provisioning the system and automatically configure it with configuration management tools such as Puppet, CFengine or RHN Satellite. You not only need to have your configuration management ….Read More

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released

End of April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 was released. As always it is based on Debian’s Testing-Release. Canonical “stabilizes” the testing tree of Debian and adds its own look. This time, Ubuntu radically changed its look. From my point of view it looks ugly, very ugly. Strange colors, low contrasts in menus, orange icons in Nautilus… window buttons on the left side… At the end of the day an usability-horror. Under the hood Ubuntu is a very stable distribution with recent ….Read More

Confused about write barriers on file systems…

As ext3 is already known as a very robust file system why is the default mount option still barrier=0? The problem is LVM and the device mapper. They  do not support barriers. When mounting ext3 on a LV, the option barrier=1 it should be ignored and a warning written. So far so good. Trying this brings a lot of confusion. According to a Red Hat bugzilla entry one should get a warning, but no signs of that neither in /var/log/messages nor ….Read More