Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

What is puppet?

03:15 PM

Puppet is an application to automate the configuration of UNIX systems. The puppet master defines the intended system state (packages, files, services, etc) on a central server. On the managed installations an agent regularly fetches the manifest and applies it to the system. The agent sends information (like hostname or IP address) from the system to the server. This can be used to parametrise the configuration.

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PuTTY: default to UTF-8

03:53 PM

There are quite a few posts on how setting the “Window > Translation > Received Charset” of PuTTY to UTF-8 helps when connecting to current UTF-8 base Linux systems.

I’ll just add this snippet of code, which can be used as putty_utf8.reg to fix this up in a single double click:


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\SimonTatham\\PuTTY\\Sessions\\Default%20Settings]
"LineCodePage"="UTF-8"

How to use Debian GNU/Linux ‘lenny’ as VirtualBox guest

12:02 PM

My dad has installed lenny (current Debian testing as of 2008-11-something) as guest in VirtualBox. To get the guest utils running, he asked me for help, so I looked into it and this is what I needed to do to get pointer and keyboard integration as well as shared clipboard to work.

First, VirtualBox needs the kernel modules and utilities installed in the guest:

# apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-utils module-assistant
# module-assistant auto-install virtualbox-ose-guest

Also, the configuration of the X-Server needs to be adapted. In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, replace the “Configured MouseInputDevice with this section:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "Configured Mouse"
        Driver "vboxmouse"
        Option "CorePointer" "true"
EndSection

OpenVPN und Windows Vista

02:57 PM

Before I forget it again, here some notes about getting OpenVPN to run under Windows Vista:

  • Download and install the OpenVPN 2.1_rc7 or newer from OpenVPN Downloads.
  • C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\bin\openvpn-gui-1.0.3.exe -> Contextmenü -> Properties -> Compatibility -> activate “Run as administrator” -> Ok

The hostname has to be set in the client example configuration.

The X.509 certificates are needed to create a trustpath from the client to the server. OpenVPN has toolage for this and a simple Certificate Authority can be setup easily. Client authentication works with username and password via PAM.

Just copy the config file and the certificate authority’s certificate to C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config\foo.ovpn. Now it is available as “foo” entry in the OpenVPN GUI.

Now it’s ready to rock’n'roll.

Google Talk Review: Benefits from Open Sourcing Code

02:53 PM

Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick talk in this Google Talk about the business reasons behind open sourcing code, as well as how to successfully build a community around the code. In this entry I collected their arguments.

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