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 …

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 …

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 …

The Mac tip from a few weeks ago was Easily distracted? Mac tools that keep you focused. This was an interesting tip to write because when you sit in front of the computer all day, it's sometimes hard to quantify how much productive work you get done. Like now, updating …

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 …

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 …

This week's mac techmail is How to reassign the primary display on multi-display Macs which is pretty simplistic, but really sweet all at the same time. I'm not sure how to do this in Windows (never done it before) and on Linux it's pretty straightforward too. But it wasn't until …

Last week's techmail was Obtaining network information with netstat where we take a look at some of the nifty little things you can do with the netstat program including listing which ports are being actively listened to and by which programs and what active connections there are (both inbound and …

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 …

Last week's mac techmail was Still frustrated with Apple Mail searching which gives some of the reasons, and some possible workarounds, to the awful search capabilities in Apple Mail. For a mail client today, it sure doesn't offer very much power for email searching, yet on the Mac it's one …