Until recently, Linux authentication through a centralized identity service such as IPA, Samba Active Directory, or Microsoft Active Directory was overly complicated. It generally required you to manually join a server or workstation to a company’s domain through a mixture of Samba windbind tools, and kerbose krb5 utilities. These tools are not known for their […]
At the speed that information travels, it’s easy to forget that the Internet is relatively young. With the potential for exponential growth, above all the negative foresight, we can start to see the benefits of the Internet when data is used to progress technology; and humanity as a whole. Cybersecurity projects dedicated to analysis, development, […]
Security experts can only do so much. Imagine the sophisticated systems at global banks, research facilities, and Las Vegas casinos (“Ocean’s Eleven,” anyone?) — an excess of cameras, guards, motion detectors, weight sensors, lasers, and failsafes. But what happens if someone leaves the vault door open? Similarly, server and network security measures can only go […]
While working as a sysadmin over the years, you truly start to understand the importance of security patches. On a semi-daily basis I see compromised servers that have landed in an unfortunate situation due to lack of security patching or insecure program execution (e.g. running a program as root unnecessarily). In this blog post I’ll […]
SSH is a common system administration utility for Linux servers. Whether you’re running CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, or anything in between; if you’ve logged into a Linux server before, you likely have at least heard of it. The acronym SSH stands for “Secure Socket Shell”, and as the name implies, the protocol is built with security […]
Don’t be afraid to use IPv6, It’s not a whole lot different from IPv4. IPv6 Basics Taking a first look at IPv6 can be overwhelming, but in reality, the addressing scheme is exactly the same as IPv4. For example, it would be possible to write an IPv4 address as FFFF:FFFF, which would equate to 255.255.255.255. […]
Many of us work with spreadsheets every day. It’s what allows us to deal with multiple projects at once, each with reams of data. A spreadsheet helps us tame this data — and the better the spreadsheet is laid out and designed, the more it can help us be efficient when processing this data. Since […]
Although you may salivate at the thought of a fine-dining experience and indulging in a perfectly seared, dry-aged steak, chances are you’re not about to purchase a tract of land and some cattle. The same can be said for dedicated servers — even though your business requires high-end hosting, you might not want to take […]
Introduction to MySQL MySQL Replication using Binary Log File Position, as opposed to Global Transaction Identifiers(GTID), uses binary logs, relay logs, and index files to track the progress of events between the master and slave databases. GTID can be used in conjunction with binary/relay logs, however, starting with an understanding of binary log file position […]
If you’re running a Linux server and you value uptime and stability, this server maintenance guide will help keep you on track. It’s best to perform maintenance and checks on a regular basis for various reasons. It’s not fun being a sysadmin and finding out that a downtime causing issue could have been easily prevented. […]