Matt Simmons, of Standalone Sysadmin fame, has a great post up about SNMP, giving a good all around introduction to SNMP. I highly recommend reading it if you’re getting started in networks, or even if you just want to brush up.
Whilst driving back from our 4th of July celebrations in San Antonio, I got alerted to a server running low on disk space. As it hadn’t hit critical, and there was still a fair bit of space left, I decided to wait until I got home. When I looked at the server, I pulled up my trusted space analyzer, TreeSize.
Read more…In part II of my walk through on configuration management, I’m going to work on setting up Subversion (SVN). SVN is a version control system and, just like any version control system, is used to keep track of changes. The most common use is in a development environment with teams of developers so that everybody can work on the code, without having to worry about other people’s work. It’s obviously not limited there, it can be used as a form of backup, keeping a track of what you’ve changed, and when. This is how we’ll be using it for our configuration management.
I’ve been asked to write a post on configuration management, and version control by a friend, Steven Klassen. Instead of a single post, I’m going to break this into several posts as some parts might be unimportant to some, and they can easily skip a whole post. I’ll be posting this over a few days, so stay tuned. If you’re not subscribed to my RSS feed, now would be a great time.
In a case of what I’d call security through obscurity, the Linux Poison blog has a posting up on how to hide the PHP information in your web server. The idea is that the less a potential hacker knows about a system, the better. Here, I’m going to take it one step further, and show you the impact of some other options, and what data gets hidden.
The Last In – First Out blog has an interesting post on on software patching, or more specifically the complexities behind maintaining updated systems. The post brings attention to the numerous security issues, and how hard it is to build a secure patched system, even for the tech savvy folks. He doesn’t call out just one vendor…
I’m obviously playing catch up with a number of posts I’ve been meaning to do. This was something from something I read back in November by Tom Limoncelli, but was something I had planned on writing about anyway. The post, titled “Run, run, run, dead“, brings a nice analogy of things breaking in the analog/digital eras, and points out that as system administrators, we should be using the analog method of monitoring.
