Saltstack: Master Setup

What can I say about Saltstack but, WOW! After only using it a couple of days I already have a working CM implementation and not only is it easy to use and incredibly powerful but it is FAST! This is not to say I still dont want to spend more time with Chef but after using Saltstack I find it very hard to peel myself away! As with anything I enjoy I thought it would be a good idea to build out some walkthrough’s for my own reference as well as to help anyone else getting started. To begin I thought I would …

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ownCloud quick setup for Debian

First off I wanted to say that the documentation and installation of ownCloud is incredibly easy. I just wanted to add a few notes for people who are setting it up on a Debian distro as there is a slight difference from Ubuntu as well as offer some more assistance for Active Directory users. The following is the apt-get install string to install all needed dependencies for Debian. The apt-get string provided in ownCloud’s documentation should work fine for Ubuntu but you will get some missing package errors for php-pdo, php-xml, php-mbstring and php-zip in Debian: apt-get install apache2 php5 …

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An alternative to Dropbox

With the popularity and ease of use of services such as Dropbox/box.net I have heard a lot of rumblings from users and companies looking for “business” solutions to the file sharing problem. While there does appear to be a multitude of cloud-based solutions the number of companies offering non-cloud based alternatives appear to be pretty slim and (in my opinion) overpriced with prices ranging anywhere between $1,600 to $11,000 a year for only 20 users. Based on my experience purchasing business software over the years I was anticipating something standard such as a one time software purchase ($1,000-$11,000+) with a …

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2008 Citrix Profiles

The more time I spend building Citrix/TS servers on Windows 2008 the more I realize that even though some of these changes have made things more difficult at first they ultimately will make creating new servers a bit easier once everything is scripted properly. The following document contains registry entries and script information and is provided for informational purposes only. Use at your own risk. Customizing the Start Menu It used to be possible to create a user account, customize the profile and then copy the profile over the Default User profile. This method is not possible in 2008 and …

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Windows 2008 Policy Settings for a Citrix Server

Lately I have been setting up a few Citrix XenApp Servers using Windows 2008 R2. I was surprised to learn that some of the things I took for granted in 2003 policy are not available in 2008 R2 and I needed to either create registry hacks or file policies. So I thought I would take some time to document some of these setup procedures. Windows Explorer In the left hand pane of Windows explorer I wanted to remove the Favorites, Libraries and Network folders. To do this you first need to navigate to the ShellFolder keys below and grant Full …

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GIT Hosting with gitolite

Setting up GIT hosting using gitolite This is my first git server and after some reading I decided to build gitolite to manage my git repositories. To begin building we need to generate a public/private key pair on your workstation and then we need to download and install gitolite from github since gitolite is not currently available in my servers distribution (Ubuntu 10.04). Alternately, you could install gitolite from your distribution (but that may change these instructions a bit). From your workstation First I generated a DSA keypair on my workstation. $ ssh-keygen -t dsa Generating public/private dsa key pair. …

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Transitioning Subversion to GIT

So it has been a long time coming, I have heard about the benefits of GIT for a while now but have not had time to play with it much. So far I am looking forward to improvements in performance over SVN as well as a more secure implementation to share sections of my repository with colleagues. Lastly I hope at a later date to circle around and build out an active directory/ldap enabled config and to start using GIT to manage Linux configurations; but first I need to get my data out of Subversion. To begin we need to …

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