Hunter Lannon

One of the annoying things about web hosting is managing certificates - nobody wants to spend time creating Certificate Signing Requests and checking emails for expiry notices. They expire, and domains change and become invalid, leaving a system administrator to communicate with a Certificate Authority (CA) to get new certificates and install them on the servers that need them. This manual process is tiring, boring, and has the potential to bring downtime to your services.

Jordan Ryan

We’re reminded this week of how long-lasting and impactful our contributions can be as we celebrate CentOS turning 15 years old this week! As a contributor to CentOS since the beginning, Tag1’s very own Jeff Sheltren was interviewed by TheCentOSProject to reflect on his involvement. Summary below the video clip: Jeff first started working with CentOS when migrating away from Solaris while working at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) (2004/2005) Jeff wrote one of...

Jeff Sheltren

Earlier this year we undertook a project to upgrade a client's infrastructure to all new servers including a migration from old Puppet scripts which were starting to show their age after many years of server and service changes. During this process, we created a new set of Puppet scripts using Hiera to separate configuration data from modules. The servers in question were all deployed with CentOS, and it soon became obvious that we needed a...

Jeff Sheltren

Easy Integration
I was recently working on scripting some OS installs of CentOS 5 and 6. As part of the deployment, I required drush be installed. Now, I’ve considered using the drush package found in EPEL but it don’t meet my needs for a number of reasons: It is built for Drupal 6. It has a dependency on the Drupal 6 package in EPEL meaning I have to install that if I want to pull in drush...

Jeff Sheltren

It's Not The Problem
I see a lot of people coming by #centos and similar channels asking for help when they’re experiencing a problem with their Linux system. It amazes me how many people describe their problem, and then say something along the lines of, “and I disabled SELinux...”. Most of the time SELinux has nothing to do with the problem, and if SELinux is the cause of the problem, why would you throw out the extra security by...

Rudy Grigar

Yum!

I have created a centos/rhel Yum repository for x86_64 architectures containing all of the necessary packages for using HipHop. It depends on the EPEL and IUS repositories. All of the packages are tracked in a GitHub project, and are hosted in a Yum repository at pkg.tag1consulting.com. I recommend installing the repository and hiphop and giving it all a try. Follow the instructions provided in the README on GitHub to get started. Any and all feedback...