Krist van Besien's questions

I have some odd behaviour running ntpd on a rhel 6.5 machine. This machine runs as a virtual machine on a kvm host (also rhel) and this host has the correct time (within a few ms), and an ntpd that keeps it correct.

What I noticed is that after i do an ntpdate -u the time will eventually become good, and usually stay there. However Red Hat recommends that one runs ntpd also on virtual guests. So I start ntpd. Now this goes well on most of our hosts, except for a few where I see a wierd behaviour.

On those hosts as soon as ntpd is started time starts to lag on those systems by about 0.5 ms/sec (or the 500 ppm that is the maximum ntpd will slew time by). And this even before the ntpd has aquired a peer it can synch with...

Stopping ntpd stops the time from drifting. Start it, and time start drifting again.

In other words, I seem to have an ntpd that on some systems (and this baffles me, as they are all identical) does more or less the exact oposite of what it should do.

My ntp.conf is fairly straightforward:

tinker panic 0

# Permit time synchronization with our time source, but do not'
# permit the source to query or modify the service on this system.'
restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
restrict -6 default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict -6 ::1


server time.mydomain.com


# Driftfile.
driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift

What could be the cause of this?

We have taken delivery of a bunch off Dell Poweredge Rack servers. Unfortunately when ordering it was neglegted to ask for dhcp to be enabled in the built in iDRAC controlers... So they are all stuck on the same IP address. Which means that I'll have to go to each of them individually and configure a new IP in the console...

In the future I want to avoid that. Now Dell proposes to deliver the next batch with auto discovery enabled. As I understand this means that when the machine wakes up for the first time the iDRAC will request a DHCP address. The DHCP server then supposedly also provides a "provisioning" server, that provides it with a username and password, and a configuration to be applied. This would allow us to for example configure things like RAID automatically.

However, I can't seem to find a way to set up such a provisioning server that does not involve setting up a windows machine. I want to use Linux tools exclusively.

Is there a way to do this? I want to just rack servers, switch them on, and then do everything remotely. And that using only linux tools?

I have a problem with a wordpress site on a server I admin. I don't know anything about wordpress however.

My problem is that we want the site to be accessed over https, bot somehow all requests to https:// URLs are answered by the server with a 302, redirecting to http.

The wordpress site itself is configured to use https, and we see that in the pages that are generated the links are all https links.

In the apache config there are no rewrite rules and no redirects.

However, any request to a https:// URL is answered with a redirect to the equivalent http URL. And I really would like to know where these redirects are coming from, what is generating these redirects.

I've increased the loglevel on the webserver to DEBUG, but did not get any info there. I tried to enable debug logging in wordpress per the recipy I found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress But did not get a debug.log file in the directory where one should appear.

I'm really at a loss here, and need to fix this urgently.

Any hints as where to start looking?

Apache is 2.2.14 on Ubuntu. There are several other virtual hosts on this server, using php and https without any problem...

Edit: I created a small info.php script and dropped that in the webservers' root. Calling this yields the output of the script, no redirect is generated. This suggest that it's not the webserver, but wordpress that is doing it.

A second thing I noticed is that the redirect comes with several cookies, one of which has "httponly" set. Could that be it?

I've tried adding this to the wp-config.php:

define('WP_HOME','https://www.domain.com/');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://www.domain.com/');

This did not change a thing...