Managing Users With Puppet from the Command Line

While in the process of deploying Puppet, I had the sudden need to manage some users' passwords. Since I already had the software installed, I thought ralsh would be the easiest way to handle the job. I could have scripted a bunch of ssh/awk/sed/etc commands, but that just didn't seem very robust. Sure, it'd have worked fine back in 1999, but this is Two Thousand Freaking Ten.

Here's the script I wrote.

WARNING: You'll need to disable history or otherwise remove the shell history file after relogging.

Easily force PXE boot in Linux without IPMI

Sometimes I need to PXE boot a box for reinstall and don't have easy access to the BMC. Sometimes I don't want to try to race the BIOS prompt for PXE booting. What can I say, I have a short attention span, er, other things to do while the BIOS posts.

One option I could use is ipmitool, but I like to just overwrite the MBR with dd.

Here's the command I use:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1