Archive for Linux
Great security and auditing resource for your network
The Center for Internet Security has a great list of security configuration and audit guidelines. A great resource comprised of 40+ consensus Security Configuration Benchmarks for Operating Systems, Middleware, Software Applications and Network Devices. The Benchmarks are: Recommended technical control rules/values for hardening operating systems, middleware and software applications, and network devices; Unique, because the [...]
Read morePython password generator
Here is a simple few liner password generator written in compact python. import string as s; from random import choice as c x=10; print ”.join() # python pw.py Bz7DKuzqCL
Read moreAmazon EC2 benchmark – performance
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers”, according to to Amazon. All EC2 instances are sold based on hourly usage and instance type. Each instances type consists of a certain number of EC2 Compute [...]
Read moreCUPS Purging not-completed print jobs older than..
When working with CUPS using remote print queues, you may find that the remote printer is not always available, has timed out, ran out of paper, has a paper jam, etc. Sometimes this causes a job to ‘not-complete’ and when running ‘lpstat -o’, you see old print jobs. We put together a quick script to [...]
Read moreRHEL4 Kernel – PowerPath – OCFS2 upgrade procedure
We have been working on a project for a customer to upgrade the kernel, PowerPath, OCFS2 and other operating system patches. The project was interesting as no single source of information existed on the appropriate process. The procedure issue comes in because OCFS2 relies on seeing the disks which PowerPath presents. PowerPath and OCFS2 are [...]
Read moreRed Hat, Fedora openssh security compromise
Many of you may have already read the news, but for those of you that have not here is a recap. But first, let me state that we have tested all of our customer’s servers, and none have been compromised. An email was sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it started with, “Last week we [...]
Read moreExtracting files from rpm and deb packages
We ran into an issue where an init script was missing and we needed to restore the file. The backup (of course) did not include the file we needed. We had to download the package, extract the contents, and move the init script back into place. Below are the commands used: DEB: $ dpkg-deb -x [...]
Read moreIXOS HDSK Migration
MNX Solutions works on many UNIX based systems, one of which is IXOS (now called OpenText). We needed to migrate from WORM (9.1GB) media to a hard disk based configuration for performance, scalability and disaster recovery purposes. Below is the high level procedure I used during the migration to migrate from WORM to HDSK, on [...]
Read moreZimbra – Pop before smtp authentication howto
We had a client with 3000+ named users, and each of them were configured without authentication for smtp relaying, the qmail/vpopmail system they were migrating from had “pop before smtp” authentication. Well, we wanted to have as little disruption as possible for the migration so we needed to enable this same feature in Zimbra. It [...]
Read morecPanel / Fantastico Deluxe install doesn't do anything.
We ran into an issue when installing Fantastico. After clicking the installation button, everything seemed to download just fine, but every time you go back to the Fantastico link it says it is not installed. It turns out, Fantastico uses wget to download files. wget is called with the ‘-P’ option, which is not honored [...]
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