Setting Up a Bridged Network Interface for KVM in Ubuntu

The process for setting up a network bridge for KVM in Ubuntu is actually fairly simple. For the purposes of this demo, we will assume that you already have KVM/QEMU installed from the Ubuntu Repos and that you are not using Network Manager. If you are using Network Manager, you must disable it prior to following these instructions. I am using  Ubuntu Server 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), but this should work for 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

check_esx3 error "Permission to perform this operation was denied"

Today I was setting up VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 5.0) on a new server. Since I'm on the Kool-aid, the first thing I do when setting up a server is getting some kind of Nagios monitoring going. For several years, on ESXi servers, I have been using op5's check_esx3 plugin. Today was the first time I had set up an ESXi 5.0 server though, and when I first ran it after creating my Nagios user in ESXi I got the following error:

Permission to perform this operation was denied

Installing MongoDB with Replication on Ubuntu

Here I describe how to install MongoDB on Ubuntu, with replication. I am using a replica set with 3 nodes (2 DB servers, and 1 arbiter).

Issues Installing x2go

I was having issues today after installing x2go.  Here is was I did to fix them.

Installing PyLucene on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

I recently needed to install PyLucene for our developers on a server running Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). Unfortunately the version in the repos was much too old, so I had to build it from source. Below I will describe what I did, in the hopes it will help someone else.

Nagios Plugin - check_rss

As IT moves towards the cloud there are certain things we can't monitor effectively with Nagios, so I made a plugin to check RSS feeds. Many cloud services offer an RSS feed with their status. check_rss allows you to parse these feeds either looking for certain keywords that exist (or don't) or the date of the last post.

Login/Boot Scripts for Ubuntu/Gnome

I couldn't find any good information on writing logon/boot scripts for Ubuntu/Gnome, so here you go.