Category: Administration
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Setup a Headless Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie on OS X
To celebrate Halloween I’ve decided to put together a guide that will show you how to install Raspbian Jessie, the (as of this writing) most current version of the Debian operating system for the Raspberry Pi. The biggest difference between this guide and the hundreds if not thousands of other guides out there on the…
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Updating the BIOS firmware on the Supermicro X9DRW-iF
Yesterday evening I posted a detailed tutorial that explains how to flash/update the IPMI firmware on the X9DRW-iF server from Supermicro. Today I’m going to explain how to flash the BIOS on the same hardware. If you’re not familiar with what a BIOS firmware flash is, there’s no shame in not knowing, here is a…
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Flashing the IPMI firmware on a Supermicro X9DRW-iF
I recently tasked myself with bringing IPMI up to date on a Supermicro X9DRW-iF server. This can be quite dangerous, as a bad IPMI flash can break IPMI in a way that requires you end up having to mail your hardware (RMA) to Supermicro to get it re-flashed. As such, I’m not hugely fond of doing…
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Automating Your MacOS X Deploy – Part I
In this post, I’ll begin to demonstrate how beneficial it can be to automate some of the more tedious tasks involved with setting up a new install of MacOS X Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8). In this early post we’ll focus on getting our machine to a state where it has the tools and…
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How To Disable Java on OS X Lion to Protect from Zero-Day Bug
A Java zero-day exploit was reported today. Here’s how to disable Java on Mac OS X Lion so that for the time being, you won’t accidentally run any applets that could compromise the security of your system(s). A command to reverse your changes is also included so that once the all clear is given we…
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Fixing OpenLDAP Authentication on OS X Lion
If you’ve upgraded to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) from Mac OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), and you’re managing a network that uses OpenLDAP for authentication, you may have found that you can no longer authenticate using OpenLDAP from Mac OS X Lion. Today I’ll be showing you a quick solution to this problem as…
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Fix for Ubuntu 10.04 Server USB Install
A bunch of tricky issues arise when trying to install Ubuntu Server from a USB drive. Also, there exists a bug in the GRUB installer that threatens to muck things up once you work through the issue of even getting Ubuntu Server installed. Today I’ll be describing how to fix all of these issues to…
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Fix for MySQL Community Server 5.5.8 on Snow Leopard
I recently installed MySQL Community Server 5.5.8 on one of my MacBooks. One of the nice things about the DMG version of MySQL for Snow Leopard is that it comes packaged with a prefpane entry. This adds a MySQL pane to native MacOS System Preferences dialog and allows for one-click Starting and Stopping of the…
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Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 10.10
In my post, Install CakePHP on Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.10, we took an in-depth view into installing CakePHP on Ubuntu 10.10. Since then, I’ve received some emails that collectively critiqued my choice of foundational programming language and suggested Ruby on Rails would be more well-received. PHP has historically been a bit of a security nightmare,…
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Install CakePHP on Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.10
CakePHP is a framework that allows for rapid PHP development. I recently installed it on one of my home test servers and there were a few steps specific to an Ubuntu install that were required but that were not clearly outlined in the official documentation. The version of the Apache web server that gets installed…