/dev/root 

I’ve got a sendmail setup with ldap_routing, it’s very convenient if you’ve got a distributed sendmail environment, in my case I’ve just got ldap_routing for mail hosts and not for addresses, so it’s expressed in the following form in sendmail.mc:

FEATURE(`ldap_routing',`ldap -T<TMPF> -k (mailacceptinggeneralid=%0) -v maildrophost',`null',`')dnl

When upgrading my sendmail platform to the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) I’ve found the following error:

readcf: config K line, map ldapmra: no map class

This is due to a change in behaviour in ldap_routing.m4 in 8.14.4, it’ll try to automatically add  -T<TMPF> which breaks the special `null’ behaviour.

The way recommended to fix this is to replace ldap_routing.m4 with the version from 8.14.3 which is available here.

In my case (Ubuntu) I just had to replace the file located at /usr/share/sendmail/cf/feature/ldap_routing.m4, then process sendmail.mc again and everything went back to normal :)

Today Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been released, this is a LTS release and as such the preferred choice for lots of sysadmin/devops folks like me.

In this release I’ve been involved in Cloudfoundry, but also in packaging puppet, mcollective, mcollective-plugins, rabbitmq-server, and ipxe. All of which I’m quite happy about, if you feel like yelling at someone you know where to find me.

This release also makes the official debut of juju as a stable technology, the slogan says its Devops Distilled but I see it more as a giant application deployer with amazing orchestration skills, all of them make it a great solution, which you can also mix up with your usual puppet and mcollective of course :)

Go ahead and take the tour, and start playing with it in the Cloud or on your computer.

Finally Ubuntu 11.10 has just been released, this is the last version before our next LTS (12.04) so it’s a big technological preview.

You can take an online tour here http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/

In this version I’ve contributed packages in mcollective, puppet and rabbitmq, but most of all I’ve been working in Openstack, Juju and Orchestra, have a look and enjoy! The next LTS will be very exciting.

We’ve been working very intensively these last three months with mcollective on Ubuntu, and it’ll be finally be available in natty, another great addition for this release alongside with cobbler.

Unfortunately, our plugins package didn’t make it on time for the natty release freeze, which makes mcollective on natty’s release on Apr 28th a bit limited, but we have the package available for your enjoyment \o/.

In order to be able to install mcollective-plugins into your system you should add this PPA by executing:
add-apt-repository ppa:lynxman/mcollective-1.0-plugins-natty

Once you added the new repo you can see all the plugins available by running apt-cache search mcollective-plugins and install them based on your mcollective needs.

I’m quite intrigued by the new devops movement that has been arising lately in the ops community.

A devops is basically a sysadmin with a deep knowledge of several languages and in touch with the code running over the platform he’s providing, normally related to new trends in systems administration as the ones used by Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.

I can’t say I can’t feel identified with this movement since this is what I’ve been advocating for the last years, I’m quite happy to see that it has finally got enough intertia to develop into a full fledged movement that will take the sysadmin field into a new era, I’m completely giddy with excitement.

If you want to read more about what devops is about I think these are some of the most interesting blogs to follow:
http://www.planetdevops.net/
http://londondevops.org/
http://vuksan.com/blog/

Also there’s a couple Google Groups, devops-toolchain and agile-system-administration