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Linux / Security: Encrypted External Drive Part 1 – Urandom
So I am re-doing my external RAID 1 drive enclosure. I love this little thing. It has two 2.5 inch 160gig SATA drives in it. The enclosure is connected via USB 2.0 but it does have an eSATA interface...
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Linux / Storage: Memory – Huge Pages Overview
A page is really virtual memory which is managed by the Translation Lookaside Buffers(TLB) in the CPU. The TLB controls the mapping of the virtual memory pages to physical memory addresses. In doing...
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Linux / Security: User Account Expiration Management
I am a firm believer in regular password rotation/change and Linux has a built in mechanism that makes it easy. The following is a brief overview of password and account ageing for Linux based systems....
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Linux / Oracle: IBM WebSphere Partner Gateway Oracle Gotcha
I have been wrestling around with IBM WebSphere Partner Gateway for a few weeks now. There are so many tiny gotcahs out there that can affect the whole installation process. The main one that got me...
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Linux, IBM: WebSphere WAS and Partner Gateway Version 6.2 FixPack 1
This is just a brief overview. The installation process is pretty easy on these. Same as with most patches, IBM UpdateInstaller “update.sh” was used to install the service “pak” files. These patches...
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Linux, Filesystem: GNOME Virtual File System (GVFS) Remote Connectivity CLI
When not using NFS, Linux administrators generally move files from one server to the next via SFTP or FTP. This can sometimes be a headache when needing to move large amounts of files between the...
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Linux, Security, LDAP: Local Authentication Fallback
I have been setting up and integrating an LDAP authentication system into our infrastructure over the past few days. This is just one small “got-cha” that I ran into. The default setting in the...
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VMware, Linux: Install VMware Tools On RedHat Based Systems
The following is a quick overview of installing VMware Tools on RedHat, CentOS, and Fedora systems. Specifically for VMware ESX, ESXi, and vSphere systems. First, go into the VMware console and...
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Linux, Networking, Security: Get Remote SSL Certificate From Command Line
Easy way to get the SSL certificate of a server from the command line in Linux. The nice thing about it is that you get the full certificate chain. Nice for troubleshooting issues. After the...
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Linux: Cat And Tac – Reverse File Browsing
I always wind up forgetting the “tac” command, but it is definitely useful! Normally when I am trying to track down issues, the command usually winds up looking like [root@tsthost01 log]# tail -50...
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Hardware, Linux, Networking: Cisco UCS Time Problem
So we have our new Cisco UCS system installed and a weird problem is showing up. The Cisco UCS Manager console shows the correct date (2010), but when setting up a new server, the date is incorrect....
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Storage, SAN, Linux: EMC PowerPath Configuration On Cisco UCS
The following is a walk through of installing EMC PowerPath software on RedHat based Linux hosts (CentOS/Fedora). This is required to fully utilize multiple paths to EMC SANs. The test server used here...
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Cisco, VMware: Cisco UCS B250-M1 VMware Consolidation Ratio (Oracle DBs)
So a few days ago, I put out a post on the VMware Virtual Machine consolidation ratio I saw on our Cisco B200-M1 blades. This post will go over the same for full width B250-M1 blades. The server itself...
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Cisco UCS B200-M1 Interaction Times
So when it comes to maintenance, I time almost everything. I really like being able to estimate how long specific actions should take to complete. That is what this post is all about. I will be going...
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Linux IPtables Port Redirect
So a few days ago we needed to do a port redirect on a server. This was a new implementation of an app server, but the link for all the clients refered to port 80. The new install listed on port 8080....
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