SysAdmin

Back to Backups

In my Open-Source Classroom column a few months ago, I talked about backups and got some really fascinating feedback. Here are a few of the ideas from readers worth checking into:

Petros Koutoupis' RapidDisk

RapidDisk is an open-source and enhanced Linux RAM drive solution led by BDFL Petros Koutoupis (who also writes for Linux Journal) that allows users to create, resize a

Transferring Conserver Logs to Elasticsearch

If your organization manages Linux, AIX, HP-UX or Solaris servers in-house, chances are your system administrators at least occasionally need low-level access to those devices. Typically, administrators use some kind of serial console—for example, traditional serial port, Serial-over-LAN or Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI).

Poppins

My friend and fellow Linux Journalian Kris Occhipinti recently posted a reminder on Facebook for everyone to back up regularly in 2016. Although it's something we already should be doing, if you're not a regular backer-upper, you should start today!

Server Hardening

Server hardening. The very words conjure up images of tempering soft steel into an unbreakable blade, or taking soft clay and firing it in a kiln, producing a hardened vessel that will last many years. Indeed, server hardening is very much like that.

Help Me, Uncle Shawn

If you're anything like me, the holiday season is spent fixing Wi-Fi and removing spyware. Occasionally, I get to install Linux for a relative who is ready to give up Windows or needs something that will run on a circa-Windows 2000 computer (Xubuntu is usually my choice).

MySQL—Some Handy Know-How

I recently was talking to someone over IRC who was helping me with a PHP app that was giving me trouble. The extremely helpful individual asked me to let him know the value of a certain field in a record on my MySQL server. I embarrassingly admitted that I'd have to install something like PHPMyAdmin or Adminer in order to find that information.

Build a Large-Screen Command Center with the RPi 2

When the folks who make the Raspberry Pi made good on their plan to release a multi-core version of the tiny computer with 1GB of RAM earlier this year, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to put the single-board Linux box to work—real work—in our company's network operations center.

Vagrant Simplified

I admit it, some tools confuse me. I know they must be amazing, because programs don't get popular by being dumb (well, reality TV, but that's another story). I have the same sort of confusion with Vagrant that I have with Wine, Docker, Chef and countless other amazing tools people constantly rave about. So in this article, I'm going to break down Vagrant into its simplest form.

Secure Server Deployments in Hostile Territory, Part II

In my last article, I started a series on some of the challenges related to spawning secure servers on Amazon EC2. In that column, I discussed some of the overall challenges EC2 presents for security compared to a traditional infrastructure and elaborated on how I configure security groups and manage secrets.

Using Hiera with Puppet

With Hiera, you can externalize your systems' configuration data and easily understand how those values are assigned to your servers. With that data separated from your Puppet code, you then can encrypt sensitive values, such as passwords and keys.

Infinite BusyBox with systemd

Lightweight virtual containers with PID 1. In this article, I demonstrate a method to build one Linux system within another using the latest utilities within the systemd suite of management tools. The guest OS container design focuses upon BusyBox and Dropbear for the userspace system utilities, but I also work through methods for running more general application software so the containers are actually useful.

DevOps: Better Than the Sum of Its Parts

Most of us longtime system administrators get a little nervous when people start talking about DevOps. It's an IT topic surrounded by a lot of mystery and confusion, much like the term "Cloud Computing" was a few years back. Thankfully, DevOps isn't something sysadmins need to fear.

Not So Dynamic Updates

Typically when a network is under my control, I like my servers to have static IPs. Whether the IPs are truly static (hard-coded into network configuration files on the host) or whether I configure a DHCP server to make static assignments, it's far more convenient when you know a server always will have the same IP.