Best posts made by RamblingBiped

I'm curious if anyone has a relatively clear-cut and dry resource for the process of creating a preseed and kickstart configuration file for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

I am trying to put together an unattended installer for a USB thumb drive that will allow me to do a base install of Ubuntu Server. I don't really do these builds with great enough frequency to justify spending the time on putting together a Cobbler server, but I do stand to save a significant chunk of time by automating the installation. I've already got the build out process setup in Ansible, but this will allow me to RONCO the whole thing from start to finish.

I've tried following a couple of tutorials I found via google, but things just aren't working as expected. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

@Dashrender Meh... I've already got handholding documentation for SFTP. If they can't download Filezilla and configure it exactly as my screenshot shows I might reconsider giving them thousands upon thousands of dollars of my hard earned money. In most cases you can just forward the information to their IT department and let them do the handholding.

@tonyshowoff Haha! I'm an opportunist! I posted here first if that's any consolation...

@Nic said in Teamviewer hacked:

The Register is calling them out on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/738093006574653440

The interaction between the two is entertaining and disturbing... It's been over a half an hour and no response as to why they don't have an updated explanation to the compromised accounts and DNS redirection to China...

I'm using 14.04 as my daily driver. It lives under "/etc/iptables.conf".

@Nic Yeah thanks for the introduction to this... I had work to do!

@scottalanmiller There were numerous responses before I could copy and paste the original post from here... lol

I uninstalled Teamviewer from all my systems at home anyway. Their lack of adequate response doesn't necessarily instill faith...

I urgently need one more of these procs for a current project. I can't seem to locate on new/used anywhere that I can get in a relatively short period of time. If you have one of these or know where I might be able to get my hands on one please shoot me a message or reply here.

@Jason said:

@scottalanmiller said:

This is the natural state of anything with a monopoly. Doesn't mean that they will not make an effort to show up on time, but it does mean that they have no reason to be concerned with customer service issues. Bad customer service is still better than what their competitor does... because they don't have one.

Oh, they have competitors but they suck too. Not in customer service like Comcast does. Verizon has great customer service but the dsl speeds here only go up to 2mbits. There's wireless internet which goes up to 50mibit but there's a lot of latency and a data cap. Great customer service as well. Comcasts service/network itself is great but the customer service is probably the worst in the industry.

In my experience (and I've dealt with both firsthand from the residential and business customer's perspectives) TWC goes above and beyond when it comes to Customer Disservice. At Comcast you can usually at the very least find one Customer Service Representative, that you can treat like a human being, and get something somewhere accomplished. TWC has all of their services so segmented that the left hand doesn't know where the right is at any given time. I had 3 different contractors and 3 different project managers to coordinate with just to get service installed onsite. After the fact I had to call and talk to Engineers on their end to actually get the service active. And within 24 hours of having service they disregarded the public IP addresses we had purchased and set everything to Dynamic; resulting in us having to get a completely new set of IP addresses.

In my locale their network is mostly undependable as well. I have to have them as a backup to my primary provider because of lack of competition. I actively monitor the connection and I regularly lose connectivity for 5-30 minutes at a time at least once every week to week and a half. When I had them briefly for residential service it was worse and I rarely saw the actual bandwidth that I paid for.

They sold us VoIP service as well and strung us along for 6 months before revealing that they couldn't actually transfer our numbers from our old office locale to the new one because of a difference in their network distribution centers. Their policy required that the transferred numbers area code match the actual location. I told them they were full of shit and the number could be transferred without a problem. I had verified with several other providers that this was not an issue. They informed me that because of corporate policy they could not make that change.

Fortunately, while waiting through numerous delays across the six month period of time I had been doing research and learned quite a bit about VoIP, SIP, and the numerous alternatives to TWC. I ended up saving a substantially larger sum of money using our own FreePBX server and VOIP.MS. After the VoIP fiasco and wasting 6 months of my time I immediately canceled my home internet service with TWC, negotiated our primary connection upgrade at the office with the only local competitor (and ended up getting more bandwidth at a slightly cheaper price), and downgraded the bandwidth of our connection with TWC to the cheapest service that we could function on during an outage with our primary provider.

I hate TWC with the fire of a million burning Suns.

@scottalanmiller And that made ME laugh out loud...

This one came out of left field for me as well. I regularly watch Charlie Rose in the mornings on CBS while eating breakfast and getting ready for work, and occasionally watched his interviews on PBS.

What a let-down.

Update:

Pulled the trigger and went with this build: http://www.ebay.com/itm/231784944527

It has the H700 raid controller, a fair amount of memory, and an internal SD Card module. I purchased a ~$120 lot of 4 used 1TB disks for storage.

Wasting my time trying to file a phishing complaint with GoDaddy.

@scottalanmiller Yeah, I've done a lot of the codecademy stuff. Finished their Python modules, started the Ruby, and have started going through some of the web dev stuff as a refresher on HTML5/CSS3.

Also, if you know a local homebrew club, you've got enough time to lobby them to brew a reasonably sized batch of Gluten Free Mango Habanero Pale Ale...

@DustinB3403 Ideally I'd like to find a good defacto go-to resource as a reference for this stuff. Best practices for implemening XenServer. Resource allocation, VM backups, etc...

For my home lab I'm planning on trying to run XenServer from an SD card off of the internal SD card module included specifically for this purpose. From your dom0 space warning I'm guessing I should probably opt for 32GB+ size for this?

My server room's cooling isn't isolated from the rest of the building HVAC, and it is normally sits around ~80 degrees.

--edit-- (addendum)

So how quickly did you do the fan shuffle? We had a liebert unit that seemed to go down every few months at my previous place of employment. Our server room would spike from 68 degrees to 95+ in about a 45 minute time frame. We had a portable AC unit we would turn on and then shuffle a series of fans into the hall to help pull hot air out.

Quick way to kill an entire day's productivity.

As a means of getting better acquainted with Python 3 I've decided to create a script that does a bit of web scraping on http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status and informs me when the state of any particular Google App is less than peachy(or not green to be exact).

I figure I would run this on a 15 minute interval and have it inform me via email if any of the services that we use have a status other than green, with the exception of gmail (because emailing me when I don't have email would be kinda pointless...); in that case I would have it send me a SMS.

Does this seem like a reasonable use for Python? Is there an API I'm overlooking that I could use instead of scraping?

Looking for opinions and/or criticism.

---Added Github Repo---

Github: https://github.com/ramblingbiped/google-apps-status

import smtplib
from selenium import webdriver
import time

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

driver.get("http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status")
time.sleep(1)

# Dictionary referencing each service's row position within the table displaying their current status
app_services = {
    'Gmail' : 2,
    'Calendar' : 3,
    'Messenger' : 4,
    'Drive' : 5,
    'Docs' : 6,
    'Sheets' : 7,
    'Slides' : 8,
    'Drawings' : 9,
    'Sites' : 10,
    'Groups' : 11,
    'Admin console' : 12,
    'Postini' : 13,
    'Hangouts' : 14,
    'Vault' : 15
}

for key, value in app_services.items():

    service_name = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//table/tbody/tr[%d]/td[2]' % value).text
    service_status = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[2]/div[1]/div[3]/table/tbody/tr[%d]/td[1]/span' % value).get_attribute('class')

    #Check the status of services, if not "green" send notification email.
    if service_status != 'aad-green-circle':

        content = 'There is currently a problem with %s!\n\nCheck http://www.google.com/appsstatus for further information directly relevant to the outage.\n' % service_name
        subject = '%s Service Interruption' % service_name
        message = 'Subject: %s\n\n%s' % (subject, content)

        #Credentials of the account authenticating with Google's SMTP server
        email = '[email protected]'
        password = 'app-password'

        #Person to be notified of service outage/downtime
        sender_address = '[email protected]'
        recipient_address = '[email protected]'

        mail = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com',587)
        mail.ehlo()
        mail.starttls()
        mail.login(email,password)
        mail.sendmail(sender_address, recipient_address, message)
        mail.close()

driver.close()

@black3dynamite said in MangoLassi TV:

@jaredbusch said in MangoLassi TV:

I don't watch videos.

So all your recent little video responses are lost content.

Would you preferred a MangoLassi Podcast instead?

I think I would prefer an animated series.