Publishing for fun

So, yesterday I published a book via Amazon's direct publishing program for the first time.  It's fiction, has absolutely nothing to do with system administration, but it works for me.  I consider it a pointer to how sometimes a project can take a very long time.  I worked on this book for around twenty years….

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Teaching the next generation

Many know that my son has been helping administrate a Minecraft server.  This server has enough people, that administrating the server means working at the Linux prompt level, looking at top output, editing configuration files, restarting application processes when the watchdog process fails, etc.  He also deals with the end users, helping them use the…

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Security for vendors

I'm sure I'm not alone in asking vendors to help us comply with our security rules.  Clients bring in new tools that are unable to follow the security rules. In some cases, the clients aren't really at fault.  The clients don't really have an in depth understanding of the security policy, or may not know…

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Solaris in.telnetd

By now, I’m sure everyone with a Sun system has heard about the widely disseminated vulnerability in Solaris 10’s telnetd code. My experiences in managing that issue from early announcement to patch might serve as a warning/aide to others who are looking at security models. Several lessons were learned as a result of the experience….

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Human monitoring groups

Operations groups I suspect are going to have real problems soon, and not from the usual causes of automation. It is very common for operations groups to not only monitor the servers, but take on trivial tasks that need to be done out of hours, sometimes even during the business day in an effort to…

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Parts of security

So I’ve been working on an internal security review and discovering that the bulk of the issues I run into stem from the fact that the users don’t seem to understand the need for an audit trail. To me, security consists of confidentiality, authenticity, and the auditability. It’s easy to explain the need for the…

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