If for some reason you have Windows running as part of a cluster, like as a node in a Selenium Grid, it is nice to be able to monitor it. A frequently used monitoring suite for clusters is Ganglia. Ganglia, unfortunately, doesn’t have a native Windows binary. Thankfully, it can be compiled and installed in Cygwin. The instructions for doing so are included in the Ganglia tarball (in README.WIN). Instructions that aren’t included are how to run gmond as a Windows service.

After installing Ganglia, you can add gmond as a Windows service by doing the following:

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At some point recently the SSH shipped with Cygwin added PKCS11 support. This support allows you to add a smart card library to use your smart card’s certificates as ssh keys. This article will describe how to use ActivClient or Coolkey to access your card, how to export the card’s public certificates (as rsa public keys), and how to use ssh/ssh-agent options to properly use the smart card.

Prerequisites

I’ve tested with the below software and versions. Other versions may work, but haven’t been tested.

• ActivClient 6.2+ or Coolkey
• Cygwin 1.7+
  • OpenSSH_5.5p1+
  • OpenSSL 0.9.8n+

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Packt Publishing has asked me to review their new MediaWiki book: MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner’s Guide. I plan on having a review done by the end of the month.

I’ve looked over the table of content so far and it looks like it will be a fairly concise guide for people new to MediaWiki. I did notice something missing already though. None of my extensions are listed in: “Appendix A: The Best Extensions for MediaWiki”! Maybe that’s something coming in version 1.2.

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Good, easy to use, ticketing systems are few and far between. Most cost a lot of money; others are free, but lack features; some are free but have way too many features that are all poorly implemented. This article will explain how to create a simple ticketing system with supporters, supporter groups, customizable fields, and emailing capability.

Notice that this ticketing system’s functionality will mostly be based on the functionality of OneOrZero Helpdesk (now AIMS). This isn’t a endorsement of the OOZ software. In fact, I went through the trouble of implementing a system like this specifically to move away from OOZ. OOZ is quasi-open source, and is switching to a CMS model, which defeats the purpose of its simple helpdesk nature.

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I’ve added a couple prototypes to my prototype wiki. All of the templates, properties, and forms are protected from editing; however, you can still add/modify data. You can modify the functionality of the prototypes on my sandbox wiki, if you’d like to test things out. The two prototypes are a helpdesk system, and a datacenter inventory tracking system.

Helpdesk system prototype

I’ve made a fully functional helpdesk application using Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), Semantic Forms (SF), Semantic Tasks (ST), Semantic Result Formats (SRF), Parser Functions, and Dynamic Sidebar. As an anonymous user, you can search, and view tickets; as a logged-in user, you can create tickets, and act as a supporter. The helpdesk also supports supporter groups, which are used for email notification, and for getting lists of tickets pertaining to your group.

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The response times on my site have been getting gradually worse over time, and I’ve simply been unhappy with the service I’ve gotten from my shared host; so, I’ve moved my site to an EC2 instance. A plus to this, is that I’ll finally be able to start keeping my prototype and sandbox wikis up to date, and in proper demo mode. Expect to see some Semantic MediaWiki demos, and demos of some of my newer extensions.

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The documentation for this is somewhat scattered around the net; so, since I had to do this today, I thought I’d share it for others.

Create the disks in the Virtual Infrastructure Client

1. Right click on the guest, click “Edit Settings…”
2. Under the “Hardware” tab, click “Add”
3. For the device type, select “Hard Disk”, click “Next”, and “Next” again
4. Specify the size of your disk, optionally enable Thin Provisioning, and click “Next”, “Next”, “Finish”, “Ok”

Re-scan the scsi bus for new hardware

1. cat /proc/partitions
   1. Note the list of devices
2. sudo apt-get install scsitools

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Solaris 10 and above and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and above have support for NFSv4. Unfortunately, how each OS handles the newest version is different, and the way it is mounted is drastically different.

How each OS handles NFSv3 and NFSv4

All Linux distros treat NFSv4 as a different filesystem. Solaris treats NFSv4 as a newer version, which is the sane, and sensible way of handling it IMO; thanks Linux…. To mount an NFSv4 filesystem in RHEL 5, you mount it the following way:

mount -t nfs4 <server>:<share> <mountpoint>

For NFSv3, you mount it the following way:

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OS X has a somewhat non-standard VNC implementation in ARD, and I have problems with it locking up, and not letting me back in. Thankfully, this service can be restarted remotely if you can still SSH into the system.

The ARD service is controlled by launchd, and will restart automatically if killed. To relaunch the service, simply run the following command (you must be an admin, or root):

killall ARDAgent

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Pat Patterson, from Sun Microsystems, has released a quick proof of concept of an OpenSSO authentication plugin for MediaWiki. This could be a really useful plugin for any organization that has decided to go the Web SSO route. If you aren’t familiar with OpenSSO, and you maintain a number of applications with some form of cookie trusted mess, or multiple logins, I highly recommend checking it out.

I was actually planning on writing this extension, and haven’t had time to get to it. I’ve asked Pat if I can test, clean up, and maintain his extension in Wikimedia’s SVN.

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