Success

So I got the kickstart working.  I should probably make a real blog post that outlines the exact steps I took, but I'm definitely not going to do that tonight.

PXE + Kickstart

I thought I made a post about the last time I tried to do PXE booting, but I don't see it.  Now I'm trying to do PXE booting + Kickstart.  Here's the link I found that's been helping me so far: http://www.smtps.net/pxe-kickstart.html .  Problem is, I don't have any experience with NFS, PLUS I'm running CentOS 7. Yeah, this is probably too many things to assimilate at once, but I'm a glutton for punishment.

To SPAN or to TAP - That is the question!

To SPAN or to TAP - That is the question!--An interesting article that I came across today that I skimmed over, but I need to read in its entirety...

Knowing that I'm doing the right things

So I've been trying to work through questions in my walk with Christ.  The thing that was on my mind today was I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels wondering if what I'm doing for Christ today is really setting me up for what Christ wants me to do tomorrow.  And I'm getting an inkling that I've been off base.

Around this time last year I was on a spiritual high.  That was largely because I was experiencing the peace of God.  I had gotten back to that place where I really did feel complete in him.  But after awhile that peace was spoiled by this incessant questioning in my mind about whether I was actually doing what God wanted me to do, about whether I was doing the right things.  It wasn't just about whether I did good that day, it was also about what God had for me in terms of future ministry and whether I was adequately preparing for it.  Jennifer Taylor's God Does Not Have a Plan For Your Life was absolutely revolutionary in that regard.  Just the idea made me start rethinking a lot of things.  I have been thinking about how there are a lot of things that I have been taught in church that I have accepted, that may or may not have their basis in scripture. It occurred to me that a significant amount of contemporary Christian teaching may not be from the bible at all, so I've been taking a second look at the things I've taken for granted.

So lately I haven't been as concerned about the big picture, but there's still the question about my daily walk with Christ.  And now I'm wondering about whether the issue is about communication with God--am I hearing from him--or me just wanting to have good feelings, wanting to be at peace.

Communication has been the other thing I've been looking at with fresh eyes.  And relationship.  Much is made of relationship with God in Christianity today, but is it scriptural?  Obviously we are to have a relationship with God, but how is that relationship characterized?  What should it consist of?  I can talk to God?  What type of communication am I to expect in return?

Fun with SELinux

I installed Xymon on a webserver, and I was having a lot more issues than I thought I would.  I had installed Xymon before, but halfway through I realized that the VM I installed it on before must have been Debian, and I probably just used the .deb packages.  As it turns out, the problems I was having weren't related to CentOS, but SELinux.  I kept getting 403 forbidden errors, which were ultimately permission issues. Eventually I found the solution on the CentOS forums:

# semanage fcontext -a -t public_content_rw_t '/home/user(/.*)?'
# restorecon -R /home/user


Now that I think of it, I had problems with Apache reading a .conf file that I linked to from user directory, so that was probably the same issue.

I posted a message on Facebook asking about what I should be doing now in terms of the Gospel.  My cousin sent me to christianpost.com, and and article by Ed Stetzer entitled, "Preach the Gospel, and Since It's Necessary, Use Words."  It was a pretty good article.  I wasn't sure what I should do with it.  I'm thinking about reposting to Facebook, but I figured at the very least I should post it here. The article can also be found on Ed's  christianitytoday.com blog, and was reprinted in Ligonier Ministries TableTalk magazine.

PDF fun

So I needed to create scan a 2 page document into .pdf format.  I went up to the computer that the scanner is connected to and scanned the document unto a multipage .tiff file.  Then I went downstairs to my laptop and copied the file.  Immediately afterwards, I realized that I'd skipped a step.  Usually, I convert the .tiff file to .pdf on the upstairs computer, using IrvanView.  My laptop is running Fedora, so IrfanView is not an option.  The solution?  A command-line program called tiff2pdf that I learned about here.
Once I looked at the finished .pdf, I realized I'd scanned the documents landscape--my only option--but the document is actually a portrait document.  How could I go about rotating it?  Irfanview?  Probably, but I didn't want to go back upstairs.  I've used pdftk for merging .pdfs, but wasn't sure if it could rotate files.  As it turns out, it can!
Once that was finished, I remembered something else: I was supposed to number the documents.  I didn't want to write on the documents themselves, and I didn't want to copy the documents and then rescan them either.  I was thinking that IrvanView would have been my best bet--I could have added the numbers in the editor before exporting to .pdf.  If only there was a way to add a watermark to a .pdf.  As it turns out, pdftk can do that too!  But then, the watermark itself needed to be a transparent .pdf, and I had no idea how to do that.  I found the answer here:

convert $INPUT.PNG -transparent white -background none $OUTPUT.PDF
pdftk $FORM.PDF stamp $OUTPUT.PDF output $COMPLETED_FORM.PDF