This weekend I setup SaltStack in a VM in my home lab, with all my home VMs and Rackspace Cloud Servers as salt-minions. Everything worked pretty well. I even used my salt-master and some salt states to install check_mk_agent on all my VMs. They all hooked into a OMD/Nagios VM running in my home lab and 163 checks later I have my monitoring system working. About 3 hours of work and a few cups of coffee. I still have a lot to learn with SaltStack, especially the proper way to use and configure salt states, grains and pillars. ...

I had tried to passthrough my LSI SAS1068E to a virtual machine in XenServer 6.0 or 6.1, I forget, but I couldn’t get it working for some reason. I didn’t troubleshoot it very much though, a few Google searches seemed to point to my whitebox setup and driver/support issues. Recently, XenServer 6.2 was released so I thought I would try this again on my whitebox server. To my surprise I was able to get PCI passthrough working pretty easily on 6.2. For this setup I’m using a XenServer 6.2 host with a LSI SAS1068E card set to IT mode, so RAID is disabled and the card is JBOD, with Ubuntu Server 12.04 as the guest OS using the LSI card and being able to access the drives attached to it. ...

Cloud Networks is a really cool up and coming feature in the Rackspace Cloud. It enables you to create private networks only accessible by your Cloud infrastructure. When first released, you could only attach a Cloud Server to Cloud Networks when creating a new Cloud Server or by taking an image and then creating a new Cloud Server based off of that image and attaching Cloud Networks at that time. Not the best situation if you already have a stable Cloud infrastructure. Luckily we can now attach Cloud Networks to an already running Cloud Server. Make sure the server is a NextGen Cloud Server based on OpenStack. This tutorial was run on Debian 6 Squeeze, but should be pretty much the same on other Linux distros. If you have any issues with a particular distro please let me know. ...

With Rackspace Cloud you can use Cloud Block Storage and NFS to create shared directories amongst your Cloud Servers. This setup was done on CentOS 6.3 and used the internal Cloud Server interfaces. First, attach your Cloud Block Storage to your Cloud Server. When I attached mine, it was designated /dev/xvdb. We will need to create a partition and format. ...

Recently I made the mistake of turning off my 1U SuperMicro router running pfSense because we were going on a short vacation. Of course, when I came back and turned it back on I came across some nasty DMA disk errors and a read-only filesystem. No matter what I tried with fsck and remounting could fix these errors. I had my configs saved so I decided to just try a reinstall of pfSense 2.03. One cool thing about my SuperMicro board is the IPMI that’s built in. On my Mac I use IPMIview and the web interface IPMI provides to connect. Connecting with both worked fine, checking system status, all the power functions and iKVM worked for console redirection. ...

These tools will help in never having to manually add virtual hosts to your Apache server. Well, maybe not ever, but they will be able to create your virtual hosts in most cases. This is basically the same tool but executed a little differently. There is an excellent post on community.rackspace.com that covers usage. First run this to include all .conf files and create the vhost.d directory in CentOS/RHEL. ...