greg haygood

To go along with the previous post about building a custom install CD, I wanted to create a custom splash screen with the product's logo instead of the one from CentOS. The syslinux/isolinux mechanism requires it own format, but it's still really easy to accomplish:

Unless you're going to use a specific VGA resolution on boot, you'll need an image 640 pixels wide, and up to 480 pixels tall. 480 will fill the screen, but in order to display instructions/help underneath, you'll want less.

I needed a custom install disc for CentOS 5 in order to bundle some additional RPMs. Revisor has the promise, but it remains unstable and mostly unusable many months after I first gave it a shot. So until they knock out those issues, here are the instructions for rolling your own. I couldn't find anything specific to C5, so based this loosely on some CentoS 4.1 instructions.

QEMU is a super quick way to test custom ISO images. The major linux distros have it in their respective repositories.

There seem to be a number of fancy ways to get Windows machines to send their Events to a syslog server, but for downright simplicity, I chose evtsys from the Purdue Engineering Computer Network. To make it even easier, I added a silent installer on top of it using NSIS so we could deploy through our systems management tools.

I may have finally found the perfect monitor solution for my network: Zenoss. I have been using Nagios + Cacti + Smokeping for quite a while now. It works, but it's not integrated, and for many services, I'm running 2-3 checks. Running those every 5-10 minutes generates a tremendous amount of traffic (during the last 2 weeks, the monitor station has caused 20% of all traffic crossing the primary firewall!). The closest all-in-one I'd found previously was OpenNMS, which is so difficult to really understand and manage well, and so didn't fit my needs.

The sound on my laptop has always been muted after a suspend/resume cycle. I had hope Edgy would resolve that, but it didn't. The various posts (1, 2) I could find on the issue suggested a combination of toggling KDE's KMix setting "Restore volumes on login" (which would logically only apply on startup, anyway) and the alsa-utils save/restore.

OK, so my problem isn't unique: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=470495But at least there's an easy workaround until Edgy & VMware get back on the same page. No need for the vmware-any-any patch, and it works with Workstations 5.5.2 and Server 1.0.1. Just prepend the following LD_PRELOAD setting to the command invocation:<br /><blockquote># LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.3 vmware</blockquote><br />

Took the plunge and upgraded the laptop just 2 days after Edgy was released. Between my DSL acting slow and the servers likely getting pounded, it took a full day to download the 1.2GB of packages. Eventually got it all upgraded, though, and all was good in Ubuntu land .... except for Vmware Workstation. The modules recompile and load fine, but the program hangs on startup. No useful info via strace.Just discovered that vmware-server-console has the same issue.....