homespun

Mounting CIFS shares in fstab - RHEL5

There's a number of references to mounting cifs shares in /etc/fstab out there. I thought the swerdna article was very helpful. Although the author talks about OpenSuSE, it was close enough for most of my RHEL5 needs.

I ran into the problem of a late-starting network. I tried the techniques in the Troubleshooting section, but none of them seemed to work. Although man mount talked about the _netdev option, it didn't work on my system - RHEL 5.7 - and gave me an error during boot.

I also tried the trick about using a crontab entry - also failed to work. The last workaround was to use after.local to run mount -a. However, RedHat doesn't use after.local. The answer was to put the command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. This file does the same thing for RedHat that after.local does for OpenSuSE.

Lastly, I needed lighttpd to start using a document root on the CIFS share. In short, the daemon wouldn't start if the mount wasn't present. So, I added service lighttpd restart after the mount command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. Worked like a charm!

Bonding NICs in RHEL 5.5

I ran into something yesterday. I installed RHEL 5.5, then set about bonding two nics together. When the bond was set to a static IP in a different LAN segment, the server wouldn't finish booting. It was somewhat responsive to keyboard input (Enter caused the screen to advance one line) but that was about it.

I thought the install was bad, so I re-ran the installation. As long as the nics weren't bonded, the server booted fine. I installed updates from the RH repos, etc etc. But as soon as I bonded the nics again, it wouldn't reboot.

I racked the server, plugged the nics into the proper subnet - and the thing booted fine.

Install Raritan Multi-Platform Client on Win 7

New job, new duties, new tools. Here we're using KVMs by Raritan, which can be managed remotely using the Multi-Platform Client. So, I went to the Raritan website and downloaded the latest client. Unzipped the file in C:\Downloads\StandaloneMulti-PlatformClientv6.0.9\

The key to getting this installed is to make sure you are doing it with Administrator privileges. Here's what I did. Click the Start button. Type in cmd, then hit ctrl-shift-enter to start the command line as Administrator. Acknowledge the User Access Control command elevation (press Yes). Using the command line, go to the unzip directory and run the following command:

C:\Downloads\StandaloneMulti-PlatformClientv6.0.9> java -jar mpc-installer.MPC_6.0.9.5.3.jar

and follow the prompts. You should be good to go.