Wow, today I logged into my first AIX Server in about 4.5 years. It was a horrible experience. I've been working with Redhat/CentOS pretty much exculsively for so long, I was mostly helpless to do anything of importance on the... Continue reading

So I recently moved to a new job where we are running full blown enterprise Redhat Linux. RHEL 6 to be exact. Being a big Redhat fan, and Certified Redhat Engineer I was pretty excited to play with the real... Continue reading

So I have recently made the switch to Kubuntu 12.10 on my new desktop. Basically I am building a monster workstation and I ran into issue running Fedora 18. Since I wanted Steam support too I decided not to try to move to an earlier Fedora version, but rather, I chose to give Ubuntu another try (its been years since I have run Ubuntu). Continue reading

This is an interesting one that I ran into today on an RHEL 6.3 VM that is using SSSD for authentication against LDAP. User contacted me stating that he was unable to su to a particual user. Continue reading

6a00d8341c77ee53ef01630028e663970dI am, and have always been, a Linux/Unix Administrator, until VMware forced me to learn a bit of Windows. This, above all, has been the very WORST part about Vmware. Just to run Virtual Center, I had to BUY Windows, I had to Install Windows, and I had to try to learn Windows. Oh, and then I had to slap some sort of virus protection on it, and figure out how to patch it. And then worst of all try to authenciate to it, as I am not administering Active Directory. No, I use Openldap, as any Linux/Unix admin would. Continue reading

This is my first post in what I hope to be a long line of Cisco networking related posts, as I have just gotten my hands on a bit of used Cisco equipment and hope to use it to setup... Continue reading

So I while back I had the need to buy a new new video card for my Fedora 14 desktop. Specifically I needed a semi-decent HDMI capable PCI card as my current workstation at home only has one PCI-E slot,... Continue reading

Spending a lot more time in ESX land these days and am working on auto installing and auto updating vmware tools. Found the link below which will be helpful for configuring vmware tools at boot. Not the greatest thing for... Continue reading

So I ran into this one today on RHEL 6.0 when trying to mount up a few additional isos on one of my remote kickstart servers. I have actually run into this issue before in RHEL 5 ( see here)... Continue reading

A while back I spit out a post on how to configure an anonymous ftp server that allowed uploads and downloads, which you can find here. Its a very exciting read and will tell you everything that you need to know to get you up and running with an anonymous ftp server. However those instructions are specifically for a server that allows anonymous uploads as well as downloads. So today we are going to go over only the steps for anonymous download, which is actually much easier. Continue reading

A few weeks ago i published a Quick and Easy Samba Configuration Guide, which can be found here. After messing around with samba on and off since then I have learned a few things that I wanted to document before... Continue reading

This is part two in my IPtables series. The first of which you can read here, which is pretty much a basic introduction into the what a policy, a chain, and a rule is, and an overview of how to... Continue reading

One of the issues that I have run into in the past when working with iscsi disks occurs when a host (initiator) is unable to logout gracefully from an iscsi disk when attempting to shutdown or reboot a host. Note that this is a known issue and is documented here and here. I have not read completely through the RHEL 6 Bugzilla to see if the issue has been resolved, however I can tell you that I have seen this issue in RHEL 6.2. Continue reading

While I am in the process of documenting each and every possible method of blocking or allowing a local user or remote user access from a service, I figured that I might as well drop a small little post out... Continue reading

So almost a year ago, I put up a post on how to configure an Anonymous FTP Server using vsftp on RHEL6. You can read that post here. Anyway, that post is pretty much just a quick and dirty step-by-step... Continue reading

0993fb024232491eIn the world of Linux there are numerous ways that you can configure a Linux server to allow or deny access to a service, and while many people like to rely solely on Iptables, I wanted to take the opportunity to get my feet wet with TCP Wrappers. Note that this post is not meant to be the be-all end-all post on tcp wrappers. I am not going to review each and every configuration option, and trust me there are quite a few. Rather this is going to be a simple post which explains how to use tcp wrappers. Continue reading

So if you are reading this you many not be aware of the fact that I already put up a post on NFS on RHEL6 (you can find it here). However that post is basically just a redirect to another blog post that I ran into on the subject. And despite the fact that its very well written, and has no apparent spelling mistakes, or inapropriate comments about NFS, I felt the need to draft my own post. At this point I really cannot seem to remember anything technical if I don't put up a blog post on the subject. After all I have been doing so for over 4 years, so why stop now. Continue reading

There is a lot to know and remember about configuring Apache as you may or may not have seen from the numerous posts I have written on the subject, and the reality is that no one is going to be able to memorize each and every settings, configuration, and directive. Sure you can bing it or google it , you can even alta-vista it, but only if you have internet access at the time, however there is always a chance that you might get some bad information. So why not refer to the official httpd documentation. You know RTFM and what not. Continue reading

In the world of an Apache Webserver, a CGI script ( or Common Gateway Interface script), are programs or scripts that are designed to accept and return dynamic content. CGI scripts are the simplest, and therefore the most common way... Continue reading

Don't let the acronyms and the word "Encryption" scare you, its actually very easy to enable TLS/SSL in Apache. So basically it sounds more complicated than it is -- like these last two sentences for example. First you should probably... Continue reading

10736157-a-cartoon-rabbit-with-an-angry-expressionIf you are anything like me you would rather not have anything to do with Sendmail or Postfix, however unfortunately it can be required learning in some circles. That being said this is my second postfix post in what I call my "Postfix: Nasty!" series. The first one can be read here, and I will be the first to admit that its not very good. However I chock this up to the fact that I really don't know much about Postfix at all and I'm writing these posts as part of the process of figuring out how to do what with Postfix. Specifically this post outlines and defines the standard roles that a postfix server can serve. Below are three common roles and their characteristics. You should get to know each of these and how to configure them. Continue reading

LogRsyslog has replaced Syslog as the default logging daemon in RHEL6. Rsyslog was designed to complete with syslog-ng and has several enhancements over plain old syslog. This includes but is not limited to more granularity with timestamps, direct database logging, TCP support, and relay server names in host fields which makes it easier to track the path a message has taken. Below we are going to take a look at a few simple rsyslog configuration items. Continue reading

So a good while back I posted an article on how to troubleshoot SELinux violations and after reviewing that article as part of a troubleshooting exercise, I realized that I left out a few details. Needless to say my original... Continue reading