As a Solutions Architect for Red Hat, I have access to very nice internal lab. This lab is great for giving demo’s but it is not set-up for personal use. As such, almost all of the Solutions Architects set up their own lab environments. Since, I recently came from working at a data center, my lab is…
My lab environment is supported by a KVM virtual network at each site. It includes four datacenters, more than a handful of physical machines and tens of KVM based virtual machines. http://crunchtools.com/kvm-virtual-network/
There are several main factors in maintaining password security. When you store your passwords in an encrypted data store, also called a blob, whether it is online or not, there are two factors which need satisfied for a hacker to get your passwords. First, the hacker must gain access to your password data. Second, they must decrypt your…
A couple of weeks ago, I heard the owner of our company talking on the phone to a client. In the conversation, he referred to me as a rockstar sysadmin. Thankfully, he wasn’t talking about my singing. I chuckled a bit, but didn’t think too much of it. I mean, it feels good to be…
Reading Ted Dziuba’s article Monitoring Theory article, I was reminded of several conventions that I have developed over the years to help with monitoring servers, network devices, software services, batch processes, etc. First, break down your data points into levels so that you can decide how to route them. Second avoid interrupt driven technology like…
Recently, I set up vsftpd on RHEL5 with SSL and it was significantly easier than I had suspected it would be. I wanted to quickly share the methods I used to set up the server, test from a client, and verfiy everything was encrypted. I chose FTPS (FTP over SSL) with vsftpd as opposed to…
The logs are an approximation of reality and they cannot be taken as canonical or gospel. This is true in several senses. Logs can give insight to the standard investigative questions of who, what, when, where, and why, but almost always requires other information to truly answer all of these questions. Today, Postfix reiterated this…
Yesterday, I noticed this interesting tidbit from Rackspace calculating the cost of data over the last Decade of Storage. Of course, there a few bumps in the road that made me chuckle. Interestingly, in the last couple of years it plots the cost from $0.40/GB to $0.06/GB. This ties together a whole bunch of things…
This tutorial provides guidance on best practices and configuration of OpenSSH/Keychain, but also includes some important troubleshooting techniques for which documentation is somewhat lacking. These techniques took me several years to develop and I have tried to compile them here in one concise post so that others do not have to suffer through the arduous…
I recently read an article called “Computer. Science. Paradox?” by Ben Rockwood which pointed me to a phenomenal project called “Great Principles of Computing.” The project’s founding principle is that Computing, not Computers are the center of our study and that the Science of Computing is, indeed, a natural science. This project touches on so…