11/13/2014

RHEL7, How to Enable Software Collections

RHEL6 and RHEL7 now has an option for more recent RPMS than the canonical distro versions, officially supported for 3 years called Red Hat Software Collections RHSCL, an alternative to EPEL.

Red Hat Software Collections 1.2 – now GA Oct 30,2014

It is not enabled by default in all licensed versions of RHEL that are entitled to it.

Specifically:

How to access Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) and/or Red Hat Developer Toolset (DTS)

Lists the specific license types that can get access, but some will need to request it before it becomes available to them through an automated enabler link on the previous linked page.

In our case we should have access but do not by default:

Products that automatically have access to RHSCL and DTS

Red Hat Software Collections is already available for immediate use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to customers and partners with the following Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions:
(this list is not complete, it is abbreviated here)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Site Subscription (all support levels)

The linked page above provides a statement that might lead you to believe "requesting" access is not necessary (but it is necessary):

Products that may require a request to activate RHSCL and/or DTS access

Customers with the following Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions can get access to RHSCL and DTS for free, but they  may  need to initiate a special request for access:
(this list is not complete, it is abbreviated here) 
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, Premium
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, Standard
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Server
To request access to these channels, log into Red Hat Network and initiate a request at: https://www.redhat.com/wapps/try/RHSCL

Upon clicking on the URL in the message it launched an automated reply page which said a message with instructions would be emailed to the address on file for the RHN account you are logged into.

The email isn't very informative, but generally indicated it was generated automatically, and that an equal number of additional Subscriptions to the Licenses had had been added to the RHN account.

Upon checking the [Active Subscription - View All] in the New Subscriptions portal, a new line item appeared : [ Software Collections and Developer Toolset ]

Selecting [Manage - Subscriber Inventory ] and one of the registered systems by name, one first had to Click [Run Auto Attach] then click [ Attach a Subscription ]. In this dialog window the new option shows up.

Attaching it does nothing by itself.

Then on the registered system running:
# subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-rpms

Results in the RHSCL repo actually being activated and added to the list of repos the registered system is aware of.

Then one of the faster paced packages or one of the testing packages like nginx16 can be installed.

This is preferrable to using EPEL as it is supported for 3 years by Red Hat, as opposed to the "best effort" of the Fedora team managing the EPEL repositories.

It is not as comprehensive as EPEL, however it does include many popular packages for software of great interest, including later versions of php5.5, mariadb and others.








11/11/2014

Active Directory, stripping a domain of domain controllers


A nice script for force-ably removing all domain controllers from a domain except for the domain controller on which this powershell script is run:

Isolate Domain Controller for Test Domain 

Script  cleans up MetaData, and deletes DNS records

Script does not delete computer objects

Script does not delete NS records for some zones, it could be more thorough


A nice script for removing Site replication links, Subnets, and Sites within a domain

Script Active Directory Replication PowerShell Module 2.01

Script isn't perfect, Description can be changed to Name to select Links, Subnets and Sites

Script depends on a derived Module which has a bug in the Remove-ADSite function, which is easily fixed by comparing to the version 1.0 (you need version 2.01 if your running powershell version 3.0) and reverting the function code.


The scenario in which you would use these is when your testing a backup of one domain controller and need to remove all of the other domains controllers that are not being restored.

The GUI  tools and CLI tools available are notoriously difficult to use.

Minimal automation in the GUI tools has been applied to ease the pain if you have more than a handful of domain controllers.

These scripts simplify and run much faster than manually navigating and clicking with a mouse, or manually stepping through myriad number of tiered command line menus.



 

11/10/2014

Life, What have I been doing lately


Took a trip to West, TX to view Stars and Galaxies through a really big Telescope.

Shot over to Vancouver, Canada hopped from the Downtown area to the North Shore via SeaBus, trekked up and down and around several mountains. Then took a sea plane to Victoria, B.C. and a Ferry to Seattle.. and then home again.

Attended a small conference on Tape versus Disk technology, Archive and Retention Policies in Houston.

Deployed a Federated Shibboleth authentication system in an HA configuration with the TAMU Federation.

Working on a Powershell Script to automate stripping a Domain restored from a Disk to Disk backup system in a NAT'ted VM test enviornment, then booting from the backup images to test the domain backups.

Playing with USB OTG media management on Android and powered OTG hub technologies.

Evaluating porting Linux USB 3.0 support to iPXE... there's a lot of demand for it.