We run several (read: hundreds) of servers that are still running Debian 6 (Squeeze). A few months ago, we started seeing the following errors coming from the daily apt cronjob: 'WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!'

Categories: System Administration

It seems this problem has resurfaced again with the new version of Mac OS X. More specifically, this problem seems to affect appending search domains when the hostname contains a dot. In Yosemite (10.10), mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd. Fortunately, all we need to do here is add the --AlwaysAppendSearchDomains argument to the LaunchDaemon […]

Categories: System Administration

Every time I restart my OS X Mountain Lion (10.9) laptop, it stops using the DNS search domains I've added via the Network preferences pane. I have found that restarting mDNSResponder fixes this issue. There are two ways to do this.

Categories: System Administration

I tend to clear out large chunks of email all at once. The most common thing I do is clear out all mail older than 30 days. In mutt do the following: Shift-D to delete messages matching a pattern. This will return a prompt that says Delete messages matching:. ~d > 30d to delete messages […]

Categories: Software

On my web server, I keep my web sites in /var/lib/www. Each web site has a dedicated logs directory. Since logrotate is already rotating Apache logs on the server, I'd like to continue using that to rotate these log files as well. Below, is a Puppet snippet that uses Augeas to modify the stock Debian […]

Categories: System Administration