Servers

Why You Should Do It Yourself

Bring back the DIY movement and start with your own Linux servers. It wasn't very long ago that we lived in a society where it was a given that average people would do things themselves. There was a built-in assumption that you would perform basic repairs on household items, do general maintenance and repairs on your car, mow your lawn, cook your food and patch your clothes. The items around you reflected this assumption with visible and easy-to-access screws, spare buttons sewn on the bottom of shirts and user-replaceable parts.

Rapid, Secure Patching: Tools and Methods

Generate enterprise-grade SSH keys and load them into an agent for control of all kinds of Linux hosts. Script the agent with the Parallel Distributed Shell (pdsh) to effect rapid changes over your server farm.

Ansible: the Automation Framework That Thinks Like a Sysadmin

I've written about and trained folks on various DevOps tools through the years, and although they're awesome, it's obvious that most of them are designed from the mind of a developer. There's nothing wrong with that, because approaching configuration management programmatically is the whole point.

Banana Backups

In the September 2016 issue, I wrote an article called "Papa's Got a Brand New NAS" where I described how I replaced my rackmounted gear with a small, low-powered ARM device—the Odroid XU4.

Sysadmin 101: Patch Management

A few articles ago, I started a Sysadmin 101 series to pass down some fundamental knowledge about systems administration that the current generation of junior sysadmins, DevOps engineers or "full stack" developers might not learn otherwise. I had thought that I was done with the series, but then the WannaCry malware came out and exposed some of the poor patch management practices still

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications

Saving customers time, effort and budget as they implement SAP landscapes, including on-premises and now on-demand, are the core selling points for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. The latest release of the SAP-focused SUSE Linux server is also now available as the operating system for SAP solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Ocado Technology's Kubermesh

Instead of relying on servers concentrated in one large data center, the new Kubermesh is designed to simplify data-center architectures for smart factories by elegantly and cost effectively leveraging a distributed network of computing nodes spread across the enterprise.

PSSC Labs' Eco Blade 1U

Arguably "the greenest blade server on the market", PSSC Labs' new Eco Blade 1U rack server offers power and performance with energy savings of up to 46% over competing servers, says the company.

Applied Expert Systems, Inc.'s CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux

The contemporary data center is typified by an ever-increasing amount of traffic occurring between servers, observes Applied Expert Systems, Inc. (AES), sagely. Fulfilling the logical need to facilitate improved server-to-server communications, AES created CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux, now at v2.7. CleverView provides IT staff access to current and

ioSafe Server 5

Until now, says ioSafe, true zero-recovery-point server solutions have been available only to the biggest of companies. However, with the arrival of ioSafe's Server 5, SMEs have access to "the industry's first fire and waterproof server" designed to eliminate data loss and minimize downtime.

Simple Server Hardening, Part II

In my last article, I talked about the classic, complicated approach to server hardening you typically will find in many hardening documents and countered it with some specific, simple hardening steps that are much more effective and take a only few minutes.

smbclient Security for Windows Printing and File Transfer

Microsoft Windows is usually a presence in most computing environments, and UNIX administrators likely will be forced to use resources in Windows networks from time to time. Although many are familiar with the Samba server software, the matching smbclient utility often escapes notice.

Hodge Podge

For every article, I try to write something that is interesting, entertaining, educational and fun. Sometimes I even succeed. Many other times I have some things I'd like to talk about, but there's not enough of it to fill the space. This time, I decided a disjointed hodge podge would be the theme. So let's just have a virtual nerdy talk about stuff, shall we?
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