Boxen – Good Stuff, but not for me…

Categories: Updates

Recently I tested the application Boxen (http://boxen.github.com/). Boxen is a tool that can deploy applications and settings to a Mountain Lion based Mac easily. If you are supporting developers and high end users, this tool is for you. It assumes the end user is capable of running the scripts to make Boxen work.

Fortunately for me, Boxen does use Puppet under the hood. I was able to use the code from the puppet modules in Boxen and incorporate them into my own repositories. Unfortunatly, you cannot pull most of the modules directly into your puppet repo, as they are dependent on things within Boxen.

How not to have to join a Saba Centra online class from the LRC late, for lack of speaking capabilities

Problem: We continue getting reports from teachers that students who try to participate in a Saba Centra online class from the LRC listening station computers (with analogue headphones) experience a considerable delay in joining and cause disruption to online classes since they have to troubleshoot their microphones, for lack of being audible online. Root cause: […]

Saba Centra on startup automatically selects the “microphone” as recording device…

… But we in the language lab use the (dual function microphone/line-in) "rear input" for our headsets (for ergonomic, health&safety and security reasons). Workaround here. Apparently this startup behavior cannot be changed within Saba Centra: Any startup will bring up the “Audio Wizard” asking users, even in a controlled lab environment, to configure their audio […]

Projects 2012-13 – Xander Marciniak

Categories: Updates
Below are a selected list of projects completed in 2012-13 by the OAT Web Application Development team. More

Avahi and Puppet – Shutting it off.

An old UNIX mantra is if you don’t need it, don’t run it. I discovered today that avahi-daemon was running on some of my boxes due to a kickstart misconfiguration. I just added the code to puppet node configuration, and the issue was resolved.

service{ "avahi-daemon":
    ensure     => "stopped",
    enable => false;
}