Linux

Use APF to manage your firewall

Last week’s techmail was Use APF to manage your firewall which takes a look at using the APF (Advanced Policy Firewall) set of scripts to configure an iptables-based firewall on Linux. I was always a big Shorewall user; used it on my servers whether they ran Mandriva or Annvix. Recently I’ve been fiddling with /etc/sysconfig/iptables [...]

Ok, I’m committed now

Well, I’ve been working for Red Hat for two years, one month, and 14 days now. It’s actually amazing how time flies. I guess when you’re doing something you love, with amazing people you respect and enjoy working with, time has no real bearing on anything. When I first started working for Linux-Mandrake (now Mandriva) [...]

Nagios monitoring with NRPE allows better tracking of remote systems

The Linux tip from a few weeks ago was Nagios monitoring with NRPE allows better tracking of remote systems which talks about using the NRPE daemon on client systems to allow Nagios to get more information from the remote host that would normally be only available to a local user. Nagios is one of my [...]

My adventure upgrading RHEL5 to RHEL6

Well, I’ve begun the migration and probably picked the hardest machine to start with. One of my goals here was to do a clean migration from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 box to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 box for a specific set of services, and to intentionally have SELinux in enforcing mode [...]

AIDE+gpg 1.0.2 released

As part of my work migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I found that AIDE+gpg does not work with GnuPG2 (previously, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Annvix only used GnuPG version 1). The AIDE+gpg scripts now work with GnuPG version 2, and a new version is available from the AIDE+gpg project page. I [...]

Use Fail2ban to blacklist IP addresses and alert you to attacks

This week’s techmail was Use Fail2ban to blacklist IP addresses and alert you to attacks which takes a look at the fail2ban tool. Fail2ban is a program that will watch log files and if it notices failed login attempts on any configured services (ssh, smtp, etc.) it will ban that IP address for a certain [...]