*NIX

Centralized logging and observability is not a new concept. Decades ago, at CompuServe, we had over 1000 machines running BSD/OS, and the idea of visiting each one to check machine health was laughable at best. Indeed, even just pulling the logs back for analysis was just as bad. So on each machine, syslog had lines like the following in the syslog.conf file:

When I first got started with computers, there really was no choice for how you installed software. Indeed, you tended to do things like boot off a different cassette tape, pluggable cartridge or later, floppies. But then, there was a little bit of evolution, and you would boot the operating system off of one set of media, and insert a new floppy to run the program. There were no hard drives for these computers, those were reserved for the systems which colleges/universities and businesses had, and they cost in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars.

So, as a part of my working to retire an ancient (20 year old) server which I have been using as a NFS server, among other things, I had one major task before me... fix things so that my NAS server could be used for the what I intended. But I was having some issues around 8 years ago when I first tried this, and I don't remember all the issues, since work kept me from attacking this problem at the time.

I just posted a video which briefly goes into SELinux, how it relates to cobbler, and how to tell if an error is related to SELinux.

https://youtu.be/8c7MKGNYxqA

A brief update on the ongoing process of getting a new, up-to-date cobbler server running with the associated DNS and DHCP services. We discuss some of the issues encountered so far, including briefly discussing SELinux issues, and touch upon next steps which will hopefully have us successfully complete the installation.

It has been awhile since I have posted anything here, mainly due to work, and more recently the lack of it. One of the things I have been doing while pursuing a new job is upgrading one of my core servers, where my DNS, DHCP and cobbler servers run. It is an older, home-built 4U server with an Athlon 2500 processor, and has functioned remarkably well for more than 15 years (as they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

I have two machines which are my original two CentOS 7 installs, which date back several years. At that time, I was running an old (now ancient) version of cobbler which had a history of blowing up when I tried updating to newer versions (more on that in a different, future post), and there was no support for RHEL/CentOS 7 installs using it. And I don't mean that it was just missing the "signatures" and what defines an OS version to cobbler... the network boot just went ***BOOM*** as it was bringing up the installer.

In my previous post, I unloaded on Chrome's crappy handling of expired SSL certificates. I had to work around the fact that when trying to connect using HTTP with its FQDN (e.g. http://host.subdomain.ka8zrt.com), the browser would itself switch to HTTPS, and then refuse to let me connect due to the SSL certificate having expired. And so, I instead had to connect using the IP address.