tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54863126991470776032012-03-27T05:31:22.156-04:00Editorials on Linux, OSS, security, and events surrounding the Pantek Inc. support team.Pantek Inc.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16973829197096854272noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-71195414573764418462011-01-12T18:10:00.000-05:002011-01-12T18:10:21.762-05:00

There are many security procedures and policies out there these days, and many of them overlook the simple things that can increase the security of your servers and networks in the production environment. This blog article will focus on some simple measures that are easy to implement. Security through obscurity. Don't use descriptive DNS entries. I have seen many companies with descriptive

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-11213966874846226952010-12-30T15:34:00.000-05:002010-12-30T15:34:36.988-05:00

One of the easiest and most efficient methods of obtaining server or network statistics is to configure and install Cacti on a rpm/yum based system such as RedHat, CentOS, or FedoraCore. This post covers the basics of getting Cacti working on a RedHat or yum based system and monitoring the stats that are available on that system. I also cover the source method of installing Cacti for advance

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-50006509297372136982010-11-15T13:46:00.031-05:002010-11-16T13:16:59.276-05:00

All you need is a single server to feed your High Availability Network Cluster. This example will provide for Apache HA without anything complex like session handling, and will focus on the RHEL version of Linux High Availability. The packages required: piranha ipvsadm arptables_jf You will need a load balancer machine to run Linux HA. In this example we will use Piranha and

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-56665342315053516162010-11-01T11:41:00.002-04:002010-11-01T11:42:58.775-04:00

Thousands of mail servers everyday pass millions of messages through spamassassin, yet most of these installations are using only the standard spamassassin rules. Many servers aren't taking advantage of many of the great features spamassassin has to offer. The first thing you need to know about enabling custom rules and setting up spamassassin in general is this: do your work in local.cf or

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-25777155551134639312010-10-18T13:25:00.000-04:002010-10-18T13:25:46.476-04:00

Virtualization technologies are moving to the forefront of computing. VMWare, OpenVZ (Virtuozzo), VirtualBox, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V... the list grows. Today we'll take a look at the most basic and critical of functions in any environment - backups. In today's example we'll take a look specifically at backups in OpenVZ. First, lets talk about what kind of virtualization OpenVZ provides. OpenVZ is

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-38767107334743963402010-09-10T17:12:00.000-04:002010-09-10T17:12:59.298-04:00

Tar is one of the earliest applications used for backups in unix and its still a very functional backup tool. Tar is both the file format the tar application generates and the application itself and for that reason the files generated by tar are generally referred to as tarballs. Tar stands for Tape ARchiver and it backs up in a sequential manner, storing permissions, directory structure, and

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-80949691053440602282010-06-18T12:27:00.000-04:002010-06-18T12:27:20.635-04:00

Trixbox 2.8 is a nice program but the FOP that comes with it is heavily outdated and lacking the visual and functional appeal you would expect in a project that is as slick as Trixbox. Never fear however, that can be solved by installing FOP2 from the same author. The only disadvantage of FOP2 over FOP is that it requires a site license. This costs $40 for the entire site, which is a steal

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-44969203554753430052010-05-03T11:52:00.000-04:002010-05-03T11:52:29.376-04:00

Netcat is a networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol, and because of its vast diversity of function it has been called the network swiss army knife, a moniker applied to perl and emacs also. It has a full suite of port-scanning capabilities and can be utilized in much the same way as nmap for standard security scanning, but unlike nmap

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-28699001648370252852010-04-17T03:48:00.003-04:002010-04-17T03:54:59.536-04:00

We started receiving a high volume of calls regarding Spamassassin, Amavisd, and ClamAV being broken in many mail systems today and in many cases "ClamAV Segmentation Faults". Additional research yielded that the cause of this issue was a new signature added to the ClamAV daily definitions that exceeds the length a signature can be in all versions of ClamAV prior to and including version 0.94.

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-2208187028195854012010-04-12T13:58:00.003-04:002010-04-12T14:04:33.293-04:00

I have reviewed quite a few articles on the web that discuss this topic and most of them take various things into consideration. I have yet to see one that looks at the distribution from a support view. A greater number of the tickets that we open at Pantek are for RedHat more than any other distribution. I will have to mention that RedHat changing their business model over the recent years has

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-61588285864948269312010-04-08T13:27:00.001-04:002010-04-08T13:31:16.831-04:00

Introduction "The purpose of a windowing system is to put some amusing fluff around your one almighty emacs window." -- gnu.emacs.help That quote does not begin to do justice about the power that the Emacs editor offers its user. From integration with source-code management tools right inside the editor to a large number of special editing modes for any number of different languages to a wide

Scott Rallyanoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-9756308674771969472010-03-29T17:59:00.000-04:002010-03-29T17:59:39.843-04:00

One of the most basic tools and most useful tools in the network and security tool kit is nmap. Nmap is a tool designed to scan a remote host and tell you what services it has running, what operating system constructed the TCP packets on the host and what ports are being filtered by a firewall. In its most simple form you can invoke nmap like this. (Note that I am running this via sudo because

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-45512606350443406402010-03-15T13:41:00.003-04:002010-03-15T16:36:40.960-04:00

When you say 'vi' one of two things occur with users-- a look of utter panic because they once got in the program and couldn't get out without killing the terminal session and couldn't figure out how to make changes to the files, or alternately, a grin as they remember taking some job that looked overwhelming and found finishing it was much easier because of vi. There are a couple strong cases

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-34488476323104497482010-02-23T11:41:00.000-05:002010-02-23T11:41:15.467-05:00

Almost everyone is at least vaguely familiar with the Apache .htaccess file. In case you're not familiar with it the .htaccess file is a distributed configuration file that provides a way for you to make changes on a per-directory basis. When it's placed in a specific directory the changes dictated by the file only apply to that directory and sub-directories of that directory enabling the users

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-32116323185404401442010-02-08T17:33:00.000-05:002010-02-08T17:33:02.131-05:00

You may have heard about Linux Mint recently in the news and how much more smooth and easy to use it is than Ubuntu, I decided to give it a spin on one of my computers to see if it really lived up to the hype. I had used Mint 6 (Felicia) a while back and while I noted it had some improvements above and beyond Ubuntu I wasn't truly impressed. I downloaded the newest version of Mint (version 8,

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-31492461915597889532010-01-11T10:37:00.001-05:002010-01-11T10:39:48.683-05:00

Got a shiny new desktop with an nVidia card and your distribution doesn't have built in support for automatically adding the drivers directly? Have no fear, building the drivers is not a complex process and is fairly standard across most distributions. First go to the drivers section on the nVidia website and download the driver for your model of card and platform (32/64). I suggest you put

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-29981117404734286782010-01-04T10:03:00.000-05:002010-01-04T10:03:30.742-05:00

The first thing I would like to point out is that all file storage methods degrade over time. Daily differential and weekly full backups are the only sure way to prevent data loss. In this post I won't go into any acronyms or real definitions because you can always Google that info up, I'm going to cover the heart of the matter only. Many times I get calls from people who have lost files or

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-20957891791798641802009-12-14T17:27:00.000-05:002009-12-14T17:27:49.359-05:00

There are a multitude of GUI and web tools available to assist in managing MySQL databases but for the most part the MySQL distribution itself has very good CLI tools to manage the databases as well. From backup to restoration to running SQL queries and stored procedures. The CLI tools can do almost anything that the web and GUI tools can do and they're really fairly simple if you have any

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-25860561866751285702009-12-14T17:23:00.000-05:002009-12-14T17:23:09.790-05:00

After doing work with setups that were using packages like Adobe LiveCycle, which were using a neutered version of JBoss that excluded valuable features like web-console, and jmx-console, I decided to write a post on the way to enable them. The reason they do this is valid and obvious, there is no security enabled on these features and it would be easier to disable it than to set the user and

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-30470429424179702122009-11-30T11:00:00.001-05:002009-11-30T11:01:29.835-05:00

Linux has many protections available, from account security to selinux to apparmor, but one of the most over looked protections available is iptables. iptables is a program for creating a firewall to do whatever you need, when a lot of people think of a firewall they think a machine sitting between their router and computer that stops access attempts and that is true, it is a firewall. However

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-4751920334029543532009-11-30T10:54:00.001-05:002009-11-30T10:54:58.932-05:00

In the past couple months we have had a few calls about users who have lost parts of their LVM's and in most cases never were able to recover any data. I have done some research on a small file system that proves that using LVM in a stripe configuration will not provide any significant recovery options. You may recover some files if the primary drive in the LVM group does not fail. You may only

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-35281868069790922182009-11-23T09:16:00.006-05:002009-11-23T09:49:23.019-05:00

KVM, or Kernel Virtualized Machine, is a great tool for quickly getting virtual copies of physical environments up and running. It is as simple as pointing the command at an image of the machine's hard drive. I will describe this process, and for the sake of completeness I will show how to make this work with libvirt, and the virtual-manager as well. You could skip the gui and bring up the image

Alex Westhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13241179837013555562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-9304583769761166052009-11-17T15:15:00.000-05:002009-11-17T15:15:15.053-05:00

Did you just get notified by your ISP that your machine is an open spam relay and your access will be turned off if you don't shutdown the relay? Is all of your mail being returned as rejected because you're blacklisted? By the time you reach the end of this article you will understand how to prevent yourself from becoming blacklisted and you'll also know how to implement some basic features to

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-10720056038926735632009-11-17T14:47:00.002-05:002009-11-17T14:56:45.370-05:00

After trying the default linux load that came with the machine it was instantly obvious that it was neither user friendly or even usable. I was almost tempted to put an XP Pro install on this thing but then I asked Ralph W. who works with me about his eeePC experience since he has had extensive exposure to the machine in many different aspects. He recommended the Ubuntu netbook remix so I figured

Ken Tylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18105562349556536492noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5486312699147077603.post-44195914144779685762009-11-16T09:15:00.001-05:002009-11-16T09:31:39.203-05:00

There are many ways to setup ldap and many versions of ldap that you can use. Each system and version has its differences so what I'm going to demonstrate here is how to take a stock debian-minimal install and turn it into an install that authenticates off ldap. From a totally minimal base install, with working network you first edit your sources list to add contrib and non-free.Edit /etc/apt/

Ralph Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13269397095259254330noreply@blogger.com0