shrugging it off

what was she thinking?

There are certain situaitons where my boss allows us to work from home, especially after a weekend full of production releases, post-reboot problems, and whatnot. Sometimes after some tedious work I just want to shrug the mental debris off of my head, and this is when my wife caught me. I was reading an “Astonishing X-Men” piece when she secretly paparazzi-shot me behind my back and uploaded the pic online. She threatened to email my boss the link if I don’t submit to her biddings. *sigh*

(rail)Road to RHCE

I have always wanted this certification on my resume but never had the chance (or the $$$) to work on it, because of too much stuff going on with work and outside of work. But now I have a plan. On my way to work, I spend 2 hours (1 hour each way) on the MRT from Chinese Garden to Outram Park and back. I’ll bring M.Jang’s book everyday (bulky!) so that’d be 2 hours a day. If I can pull it off correctly, I will be able to take the RHCE exam by September first week.

I’m skipping the RHEL course, and I’ll be asking for CITREP’s help to partially pay for the tab.

Installing VMware server on CentOS 5.0

I encountered this weird problem in installing the VMware rpm package on CentOS 5. On a fresh install, I immediately ran:

# rpm -Uvh VMware-server-1.0.3-44356.i386.rpm

and I received errors such as:

Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
Unable to find the answer INITSCRIPTSDIR in the installer database
(/etc/vmware/locations). You may want to re-install VMware Server.\n\nExecution
aborted.

error: %pre(VMware-server-1.0.3-44356) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
error: install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping VMware-server-1.0.3-44356

I fired up my google-fu and found out that:

1. If I install the VMware rpm package without removing first /var/lib/rpm/__db.* and doing an rpm – -rebuilddb, VMware install will fail with the error above.

 2. If I reinstall VMware rpm package after removing /var/lib/rpm/__db.* and doing an rpm – -rebuilddb, install will fail as well.

 3. If I remove /var/lib/rpm/__db.* and do an rpm – -rebuilddb, installation will proceed successfully.

 4. If I reinstall VMware even after a failed installation, while making sure that /etc/vmware is deleted, installation will proceed successfully.

 Hope this helps.

ipcop – openvpn fix for ZERINA-0.9.7a14 clients

Problem1: ovpn clients cannot ‘ping’ each other when configured for ‘fixed’ leases.

Observation: there’s no route for x.x.x.y by default

Solution: edit xxx.ovpn on clients side and add:

route x.x.x.y 255.255.255.0

Problem2: opvn clients cannot ping clients on the green network

observation: the packets are not natte’d

solution: on ipcop, execute:

iptables -t nat -A CUSTOMPOSTROUTING -s 10.0.2.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

Where 10.0.2.0 is your OpenVPN Network Information and eth0 is your green LAN card

sources:

http://thinkhole.org/wp/2006/03/28/ipcop-openvpn-howto/

http://www.openvpn-forum.de/viewtopic.php?t=2448