System Administrators SAs need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have proven track records and have stood the test of time in the data center.
Read on for the list.
| All about Linux: Enabling and disabling services during start up in GNU/Linux | In any Linux distribution, some services are enabled to start at boot up by default. For example, on my machine, I have pcmcia, cron daemon, postfix mail transport agent ... just to name a few, which start during boot up. Usually, it is prudent to disable all services that are not needed as they are potential security risks and also they unnecessarily waste hardware resources. For example, my machine does not have any pcmcia cards so I can safely disable it. Same is the case with postfix which is also not used.
Here is a collection of security tools that you should look through to add to your arsenal to help keep the peace on your pc/network or unleash war on others for whatever reason.
| Most of these are command line tools which need to be invoked via the Terminal: | Applications->Accessories->Terminal
| O+P Insights: Linux HW RAID Howto | Hardware RAID boxes are cool things. Plug them in and they behave like a big and fast disk. If properly configured, they'll be another 30% faster. | Issue
There is great software RAID support in Linux these days. I still prefer having RAID done by some HW component that operates independently of the OS. This reduces dependencies a great deal and takes load of the server.
| Time For A Grown-Up Server: Rails, Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano and You | codablog | Coda Hale | More and more Rails developers are finding out that deploying a Rails application isn’t as simple as upload and rename; Rails apps work best when running all the time, and many Rails programmers are moving from traditional, shared hosts, like Dreamhost, to virtual private servers, like Rimuhosting, which allow them full control and responsibility of production servers.
| Here’s a bunch of damn useful commands you haven’t heard before. | 1. A Simple way to Send Output and Errors | 2. Parallelize Your Loops | 3. Catch Memory Leaks By Using Top via Cron | 4. Standard in directly from the command line | 5. Set a Random Initial Password, That Must be Changed | 6. Add Your Public Key to Remote Machines the Easy Way | 7. Extract an RPM without any additional software | 8. See How a File Has Changed from Factory Defaults | 9. Undo Your Network Screwups After You’ve Lost the Connection | 10. Check a Port is Open
| Linux ipnatctl HOWTO: Selecting What Packets To Mangle | If youre not familiar with the /-notation used for network addresses, it works like this.
Every machine needs an individual address. To keep things simple, we assign them in clumps; each network of machines generally gets a range of addresses.
A single IP address is 32 bits long: printed in binary has 32 binary
digits, each 1 or 0. Its standard to print them as 4 decimal numbers,
each representing 8 bits, such as 192.168.1.1. In binary, this would be 11000000101010000000000100000001.
LDAP Authentication In Linux | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
This howto will show you howto store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. I will not show howto install particular packages, as it is distribution/system dependant. I will focus on "pure" configuration of all componenets needed to have LDAP authentication/storage of users.