http://blogs.dootdoot.com/mike

I recently picked up an X10SDV-F to use in my home lab. The goal was to replace some aging components, including an older virtual server and my loud and power hungry firewall.

The X10SDV features an 8-core/16-thread 45W CPU, and can support up to 128GB of ram, has two 1GB NICS, two 10GB NICS and an open PCIe 3.0 slot. My goal was to throw a spare 4-port NIC in the open PCIe slot and pass it through to a pfSense virtual machine to replace the aging firewall, and then run the rest of the network off the 4 ports, 2 for management/vlans, and the two 10GB ports for storage, since I have my storage server on 10GB already.

This seemed very straight forward, until I went to use any one of my spare network cards:

Sure, these are a few years old (~5 years), but they’re solid Intel NICs. My first goal was to use the spare EXPI9404PT since I had a few of these on a shelf not being used anyway. I had already tested this card, it was working, so I threw it in the new X10SDV and fired it up.

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Advent of Code

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This seems kind of fun.

Advent of Code is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon different skills and has two parts that build on a theme.”

I may give this a shot — or at least do the first few days until it gets to be more work than fun.

If you want a good excuse to write do some code in a random language of your choosing, this could be it. I’m using these first few programs as an excuse to write some more Python programs.

Rundeck: Update LDAP Information script

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Out of box Rundeck does not support pulling LDAP credentials. The basic authentication module only checks against the LDAP server for success/failure, but the internal rdusers database still stores First Name, Last Name, and E-Mail address for each user, but expects them to manually fill out this information themselves.

In a small 5-10 person environment, that’s probably fine. In a 100+ person environment, that’s just asking for problems.

I worked with the Rundeck developers and found out there’s been a ticket for over a year requesting the feature, but it sounds like they don’t really need use/need that, and therefor it’s very low priority (aka probably not going to happen any time soon).

I took a look at the Jetty authentication module which was terrible, and decided I could write a quick fix for myself at least.

It’s not as optimal as having the application do it on login, but I chose to go with a batch script that runs daily and checks for missing e-mail address and pulls the information from LDAP.

The information is fairly static, but I may add a once a month job that re-scans all users and does a force update no matter what — just in case e-mail or name changes (marriage?). Seems unlikely, but it’s something.

I posted the python script on github, and the Rundeck devs were pretty excited and seemed to like it. So that was fun.

Plus, it was a fun excuse to write a python program.

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