SysAdmin

Tales From the Server Room: Zoning Out

Bill Childers — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:55:31 +0000

Sometimes events and equipment conspire against you and your team to cause a problem. Occasionally, however, it's lack of understanding or foresight that can turn around and bite you. Unfortunately, this is a tale of where we failed to spot all the possible things that might go wrong. more>>

Complexity, Uptime and the End of the World

Michael Nugent — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:52:03 +0000

Poorly implemented monitoring systems can drive an administrator crazy. At best, they are distracting. At worst, they'll keep whoever is on pager duty up for nights at a time. This article discusses the best practices for designing systems that will keep your systems up and stay quiet when nothing is wrong. more>>

SSH Tunneling - Poor Techie's VPN

Jayson Broughton — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:02:40 +0000

"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it is the light of the oncoming train" ~ Robert Lowell. Oh yes, another good quote. This post is on SSH tunneling, or as I like to call it 'Poor Man's VPN'. Contrary to the sysadmin's popular belief, SSH tunneling actually can be very valuable use for both techies and home users. more>>

Advanced Firewall Configurations with ipset

Henry Van Styn — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:41:27 +0000

iptables is the user-space tool for configuring firewall rules in the Linux kernel. It is actually a part of the larger netfilter framework. Perhaps because iptables is the most visible part of the netfilter framework, the framework is commonly referred to collectively as iptables. iptables has been the Linux firewall solution since the 2.4 kernel. more>>

tcpdump fu

Henry Van Styn — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:50:40 +0000

Packet capture is one of the most fundamental and powerful ways to do network analysis. You can learn virtually anything about what is going on within a network by intercepting and examining the raw data that crosses it. Modern network analysis tools are able to capture, interpret and describe this network traffic in a human-friendly manner. more>>

Linux Systems Capacity Planning

L J Staff — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:43:49 +0000

This video is from our good friends at USENIX's recent LISA conference in Boston.

"Linux Systems Capacity Planning: Beyond RRD and top", by Rodrigo Campos more>>

Readers' Choice Awards 2011

Shawn Powers — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:37:18 +0000

The votes are in, the tallies are counted, the hanging chads have been evaluated, and we have our winners. This year holds a few surprises, a couple dominant players and as much open source as you can handle. We don't encourage gambling here at Linux Journal, but if you had an office pool going for pizza money, it's officially too late to make your wager.

The Lustre Distributed Filesystem

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:00:32 +0000

There comes a time in a network or storage administrator's career
when a large collection of storage volumes needs to be pooled together
and distributed within a clustered or multiple client network, while
maintaining high performance with little to no bottlenecks when accessing
the same files. That is where Lustre comes into the picture. The Lustre more>>

Getting Help From Linux - Part 2 Info

Jayson Broughton — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:45:23 +0000

Well here we are again, at part two of the 'Getting Help from Linux' series. In this blog post I'll be talking about using Info to get help from Linux. In my previous post I spoke about how Info came about, but just in case you missed it I'll give you another quick lesson. Gnu more>>

Tracking Server Uptimes

Gene Liverman — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:45:13 +0000

Unlike some other OS's, Linux almost never has to reboot… or so I was told when I first started learning about it. To illustrate the point, my mentor introduced me to an app that he ran on all of his servers called uptimed. more>>

Lock Firefox 6 Prefs (Also versions 3, 4, & 5)

Shawn Powers — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In a corporate environment, it's often important to enforce Internet proxy settings for all users. Setting those options automatically is often difficult. Making them locked and immutable is even more difficult and poorly documented. Today we'll learn the basics, and from there you can customize Firefox as much or as little as you like. more>>

Creating a Centralized Syslog Server

Jayson Broughton — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:42:22 +0000

A centralized syslog server was one of the first true SysAdmin tasks that I was given as a Linux Administrator way back in 1997. My boss at the time wanted to pull in log files from various appliances and have me use regexp to search them for certain key words. At the time Linux was still in its infancy, and I had just been dabbling with it in my free time. more>>

Tales from the Server Room - Panic on the Streets of London

Kyle Rankin — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:00:00 +0000

What do you do when your kickstart doesn't kick? Find out what Kyle does in this first episode of Tales from the Server Room. more>>

Getting Help from Linux - Part 1 Man Pages

Jayson Broughton — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:10:43 +0000

man woman

No manual entry for woman more>>

Oooh, I just know I'm going to hear it in the comments for that one. But you know what? Just how many of you have tried something similar with other words? You know you have at least once or twice. Go ahead, try one or two..you might be surprised.

Creating Software-backed iSCSI Targets in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Pete Vargas Mas — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Studying for certification exams can be an adventure. Even more so when the certification exam is a hands-on, performance-based exam. The quandry most people I know fall into, is that to effectively study for such an exam, you need access to a lab environment with elements that may be beyond the scope of the average Linux enthusiast. One such element is iSCSI. more>>