I was recently asked how I became a Systems Administrator. I answered with the normal story of my life and moved on. However, it got me thinking about what has actually led me to where I am. A colleague of mine had recently mentioned how people love top x lists and best x lists so […]
Cmdln.org is dedicated to the commandline utilites of the *nix world. It's my w00t for the terminal in a world full of click and drool gui's.
I mentioned in my last post Shared console sessions that I would have an update to get near same functionality without setuid of the screen binary. Well here it is. Hopefully you are aware of expect and how it can be used to automate interactive programs like telnet. Expect is has many more uses that people are exploiting. Enter kibitz. Continue reading
I have had several posts regarding screen. Hopefully you have already realized the greatness of screen. Screen has a great feature that allows screen sessions to be shared. To my knowledge there are two ways to use this feature. First you can connect to a screen multiple times as the same user. Second you can use the multiuser mode of screen. Continue reading
I’m not really certain how common corporate sabotage is. Sure there are DOS attacks daily on this or that network or this or that server but what percentage of those are script kiddies and what percentage are well thought out planned attacks designed to cripple a competitor even if only for a short time. Typically DOS attacks are dealt with by Server and Network Admins adding black holes to offending networks. Recently while doing some research I stumbled on what seems to be a neglected DNS attack. One that the target may not become aware of until the next billing cycle or if carried out methodically months. Continue reading
It’s not that I can not read 24 hour time, it’s just a pain to deal with on a daily basis. I was raised with 12 hr, and its just quicker for me to read. So if you are running KDE4 and you would prefer 12 hour format in your panel read on. Continue reading
Recently I found myself wanting to expose more and more internal web services to the outside. We have an internal mail caching server, ticket system, a handful of development sites, as well as several other internal web services that would be handy to access from remote locations. If you have internal dns, and your dns heirichy is sane you can probably use the same trick I did to allow any internal webservice that has a proper fqdn to work from outside your local LAN. I used Apache2, mod_proxy, and mod_rewrite. Only a few lines need to be altered in the default apache site install.
Working with virtual machines after having worked with physical machines can be a wonderful experience. Wonderful that is until the bios scree blows past you several times. Continue reading
I needed to install cpanel inside of one of my Centos 5.1 domU. The centos install was bootstrapped by the default rinse configuration (see xen-tools with my patch that you can see from a previous post). If you follow the install docs you will have tried to uninstall openldap etc …. Continue reading
A few days ago I finally got my copy of Running Xen. I was anxious to see how the information would be presented. I can tell you I was not disappointed. Continue reading
Bonnie is a great tool to use to benchmark your file system. Just a quick tip on using bonnie. Continue reading
After more testing I have narrowed the issue that I left off with to a problem with the yum conf inside of the chroot. Continue reading