Sed, Wiki and ... iptables
Today was one of those days where at 10am it feels like it is lunch time. When starting work at 7:15am 10am SHOULD be lunch time ;-)Today was also one of proxies, kickstarts and sed... While creating proxy servers based on Fedora Core 2 I ran into problems with how to tell the proxies to use eth0 for one NIC, eth1 for the other and eth2 for the on-board NIC... I ended up writing instructions to have the NICs always put in in the same slots and using sed to swap ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth2 configs. So I thought... Did you know meta characters and shell variables are a bitch to use with sed. Well, that is, if you don't know how to ;-) Now I know; the solution was to use single and double quotes in the right place and use seperation characters that are not in the values of the shell variables you want to replace...
This brought me to phpWiki. How am I gonna make sure that I keep track of all those little titbits that I spent hours on figuring out and/or searching the web? I had tried using a regular textfile for that purpose without success: It's tough to find what you need and it grows big really fast! I had just come across Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) and remembered something like that was also available written in PHP. I found phpWiki (http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net) and downloaded it to install.
I did a little demonstration in the Sandbox during our weekly staff meeting and noticed my team members had been in need for something like phpWiki for a while. It's extremely powerful and easy to use. With virtually now effort one can create webpages, link them together, include links on pages without difficult tags and format the text with logically chosen characters. On top of that it comes with a built-in search engine for the pages you created. I probably still missed 75% of the real features. ;-)
We'll start using it to keep track of all the little procedures we have and have gotten accustomed to in our team of Software Engineers. It's like an intelligent notepad. And I am sure there are all kinds of modules one can add in. For now the installation didn't go exactly the way it should, but the majority of the thing works; out of the box, without any special install commands.
The day ended with iptables... iptables in the proxies we had put together for our branches throughout the country. The first one was deployed this afternoon, but without having been tested in a comparable-to-production environment. We all know what that means: It won't work out of the box. It's not a Wiki! ;-) As all tests had taken place in a private subnet that also holds the installation server, I had never had the problem of not being able to install our own RPMs in the %post install of our Kickstart. Apparently Kickstart changes it's network configuration somewhere during the install, as it looks like it wasn't able to find the installation server during part of the %post install. I am not sure yet, but will be tomorrow as I'll be running the Kickstart for this server again and follow the logs. We'll see what happens.
Tonight at home QueenB treated me to home made Hawaiian pizza! Woohoo! Lil' PrincessA had some raviolli and loved her Ceasar salade with 'cookies' :-) It's funny how she doesn't use her fork/spoon to eat, but wants us to clean her hands and face after she dirties them... Use your fork silly one!! :-)
