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Author Archives: Timothy Creswick
Twitter …finally
So I’ve finally got my act together and opened a twitter account. For anyone interested, I’m http://twitter.com/TimCreswick (@TimCreswick)
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Yubikey Glassfish Java Authentication Realm
Container-managed authentication is very useful in Java web applications; it saves writing a lot of back-end authentication and authorisation code into our applications, makes SSO (single sign-on) trivial between J2EE apps and also allows developers to hook into existing enterprise authorisation frameworks with relative ease. With our recent development work with the Yubikey, a one-time [...]
Yubikey Authentication with Outlook Web Access
I’ve recently been evaulating Two-factor Authentication (2F) implementations for one of our clients, including the excellent Yuibikey product from Yubico. The initial requirement for our client project is 2F protection of all remote-access to their systems, which presently only amounts to VPN connections and webmail access via Outlook Web Access (OWA) provided by Exchange 2007. [...]
The business case for NFS backing stores with VMware ESXi
I mentioned in this post (relating to my Solaris ZFS / iSCSI management script) to the storage-discuss OpenSolaris mailing list that we were mostly using NFS as opposed to iSCSI for our ESXi backing stores, and was asked by Christoph Jahn to provide some background on this. Here’s my response as posted to the list: [...]
Normal PDF viewing with Sony Reader PRS-505
My primary reason for buying an eBook Reader was for the large number of technical PDFs, white papers and carefully formatted user guides that I read for work. I found it very hard to find how well these pre-formatted PDFs would display on the device, with a lot of people saying that they were barely [...]
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A more sensible PowerShell prompt
The default PowerShell prompt is long and irritating. I switch my default to the following: In order to achieve this, I have the following script: function prompt { Write-Host("%") -nonewline -foregroundcolor Yellow; return " "; } c: cd Scripts " "; You’ll also note that I change the default working directory to C:\Scripts, which is [...]
Scripted management of Solaris 10 COMSTAR iSCSI targets
We’re using one of our Solaris machines to publish iSCSI targets to some VMware ESXi hosts (initiators) for client virtual machines. To make provisioning new LUNs as simple as possible I’ve written an interactive script that first creates a ZFS backing store, then creates the LU for STMF, gives you the option of creating a [...]
Use nmap to locate ProCurve switches on your network
Nmap is a great tool; utterly indispensable for network administrators. If you haven’t got it yet goto http://nmap.org or install via your favourite package manager. Here’s one of my frequently used nmap commands – very simple, but gives you a quick list of IP addresses for all of the ProCurve switches on your network. nmap [...]
Posted in Systems Administration Tagged linux, networking, procurve, scripting, Systems Administration Leave a comment
Using the Dell Latitude E6400 Built-in GPS
I recently took delivery of a new Dell Latitude E6400 laptop to use as primary workstation. All things considered it’s turning out to be an excellent choice. One of the things that surprised me was the presence of a GPS transciever built into the laptop as part of the HSPA 3G wireless card. Viewing in [...]
Tuning JVM Memory Settings