OpenVPN active/active cluster

Code snippets are for Gentoo systems but it should be easy to adapt this for other systems

This is a small howto explaining how to run a active/active Cluster (keeplaived) setup with OpenVPN. The active/active reflects that both cluster nodes run the same OpenVPN instance. In server mode this setup leads to routing problems as both nodes have the tunnel route added during startup (not after connect). This results in routing trouble as i needed the passive node to access the VPN tunnel via the active node. This is how i solved it:
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Short review: Puppet for Gentoo servers

I recently started to integrate Puppet with my company’s OS installer to build custom Gentoo servers in almost no time. The install/build system reached a stable state and i want to share some information’s on what i did to get it working. The Gentoo support of puppet is not perfect but sufficient for my use case. There are still some issues to solve:

  • Slots don’t work (I’m working on a patch for the portage provider to address this issue)
  • No nice way to manage /etc/conf.d/net
  • Only the runlevel “default” can be managed (This is sufficient for most cases)
  • No built in USE flag support (i use a binhost so this doesn’t really affect my setup). Check this site for a possible solution

The missing slots integration is especially important when it comes to Tomcat. Tomcat requires sun-jdk-1.5 and sun-jdk-1.6. I solved this by adding sun-jdk-1.5 to our install image. Apart from this problems it works very well. Continue reading Short review: Puppet for Gentoo servers

Using Django with Komodo IDE

I recently started to work on a new Django project and tried use my default IDE: Komodo IDE. Unfortunately it didn’t work out the way i wanted. Code cpmpletion didn’t work just as the import of my app. Here’s how i solved it:

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Installing iPython under MacOS X

If you don’t know iPython by now:  check it out

It’s a pretty nice tool if you work with python from the terminal. Especially the easy way to get information about modules and functions. The easiest way to install (especially in a Mac environment) is to use the “alldeps” tarball.

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Inbound Traffic Shaping made (pretty) easy

It’s not that easy to get trafic shaping done with Linux especially when it comes to inbound traffic. After some serious research i found this howto which is a excellent starting point. The supplied script can be easily customized and works pretty good. If there’s interest i can post my version for incoming traffic only.

You have . . . → Read More: Inbound Traffic Shaping made (pretty) easy

Perl: Use of “flock”

This is a small example on flock. It may help you to prevent multiple running instances of the same script. Assume you run the script via cron and it may not be finished when cron attempts to start it again. This few lines of code solve this issue.

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Portage: Patch existing Perl module ebuild by using a overlay

You may have had the same issue as i some time ago. You install a perl module from Portage but you have to modify the module’s code. Of course you don’t want to patch and install manually. Assuming the module is named “foobar” here’s how i solved it:

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