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 …

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 …

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 …

Last week's techmail was Tips and tricks to help you do more with OpenSSH which is a followup to the previous tip that talked about OpenSSH key management. This one gives you a few one-liner tips to stimulate the imagination (yet are useful on their own) with the kinds of …

A member from my local LUG posted this, and it's a gem. Highly amusing, especially for anyone that considers themself a hacker and wants to see what the defining characteristics of a hacker was 10 years ago. Whether this was something serious or something tongue in cheek, it's an amusing …

So the RPM Query (rq) tool that I inherited as 'srpm' from Stew Benedict back in the day at Mandriva is now on fedorahosted,org. Unfortunately, it's missing history because I had a dickens of a time trying to extract it from my existing svn repo (I got it so …

This week's techmail is What you need to know about OpenSSH key management which looks at a few tips and tricks in using OpenSSH public/private keys. It talks about generating keys, using ssh-copy-id to copy keys to servers, and using hashed representations of host keys to obscure what machines …