Narkisr - blog

08
Oct 11

Tripping

Securing your Linux server takes the same Unix philosophy as other parts of the system, meaning you have an assortment of tools each does its own special thing and does it well.
One of these tools is Tripwire an intrusion detection tool that safe guard the servers filesystem integrity, Tripwire creates a hash DB of a configurable files list, on each check tripwire report back on suspicious changes.

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30
Sep 11

Ubuntu PXE-ing, not a walk in the park

Ubuntu is one of the most user friendly systems both on the desktop side and on the server side, still there is one part in which Ubuntu requires a bit of tinkering which is pre-seeding automatic desktop installations.
Most examples out there are targeted for server installations, in this post will explain how to setup a complete automatic installation for Ubuntu desktop (PXE boot with preseeding).

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04
Jun 11

Pin puppet free

One of the best things I like about Linux (and Ubntnu in particular) is the package management, yet the main drawback of non rolling distros repositories is that you get might stuck with old package versions until the next release comes along.
Usually you can find a PPA or a vendor package that gives you the new goodies, in the case of puppet your left with 2.6.4, while you could build puppet from source (its ruby after all) the integration with OS is lost.

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21
Jan 11

P3wn Windows from Ubuntu

I don't run windows, still there are cases that I need to remotely run a windows tool in an automated fashion, up till now I didn't find a working solution, psexec is the tool of choice on the windows platform, googeling will lead you to this forum post that mentions winexe.
Finding how to use the tool and installing the latest version (0.9.1) on Ubuntu 10.10 took me some time that I hope this post will spare.

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08
Jan 11

apt-mirror, local speedup

One of the biggest advantages of Linux are package manager like apt yum and pacman, its really easy to get your software installed via a single command.
Still installing package via your WAN can be time/bandwidth consuming, there are two main solutions:

Caching tools like Apt-Cacher that cache installed packages in a local proxy server, the main drawback is that the first one who installs a package waits the most.
Mirroring tools like apt-mirror that mirror an entire repository onto a local server, the main drawback of mirroring is the initial sync operation bandwidth (can take 50Gb) and storage capacity.

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