I originally got into systems administration because I loved learning about computers, and I figured that was a career that always would offer me something new to learn. Now many years later that prediction has turned out to be true, and it seems like there are new things to learn all the time.

I do a lot of system administration with my thumbs. Yes, if I'm home, I grab a laptop or go to my office and type in a real terminal window. Usually, when things go wrong though, I'm at my daughters' volleyball match or shopping with my wife. Thankfully, most tasks can be done remotely via SSH. There are lots of SSH clients for Android, but my favorite is JuiceSSH.

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.

Most of you have a web server installed on your network somewhere. In fact, most of you probably have several. In a pinch, however, getting to the web directory can be difficult.

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.

An important need for today's CIOs is gaining greater granular visibility into hybrid cloud and on-premises environments to maximize the business value of their IT assets.

Application performance in hybrid IT environments typically has been a function of simple infrastructure provisioning. This limited approach cannot manage complex resources in real time nor ensure optimal, dynamic application performance, asserts hybrid IT services provider Ensono.

These days, it's more important than ever to tighten up the security on your servers, yet if you were to look at several official hardening guides, they read as though they were written for Red Hat from 2005. That's because they were written for Red Hat in 2005 and updated here and there through the years.

Server Technology says that although the engineering challenge was significant—adding per outlet power measurement into its popular High-Density Outlet Technology (HDOT) power distribution unit (PDU) family—product quality and manufacturability were not sacrificed.

Stories of compromised servers and data theft fill today's news. It isn't difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of a recently exposed vulnerability or gain control using a stolen password.

How would you find out how much RAM is free on your Linux desktop? That's a really easy question with a lot of answers—free, any of the implementations of top and Glances all are valid responses.

It used to be that the true sign you were dealing with a Linux geek was the pile of computers lying around that person's house. How else could you experiment with networked servers without a mass of computers and networking equipment? If you work as a sysadmin for a large company, sometimes one of the job perks is that you get first dibs on decommissioned equipment.

One of the most important characteristics of the contemporary data center, notes Applied Expert Systems, Inc. (AES), is that an ever-increasing amount of the traffic is between servers. Realizing the resulting need to facilitate improved server-to-server communications, AES developed CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux v2.5 with KVM Monitoring.

Okay, that title really isn't fair. NethServer has all the Linux stuff, it's just that you don't have to interact with it in the traditional way in order to reap the benefits. NethServer is a web-based management software package built on top of CentOS. You can download it as a separate distribution, but truly, it's just software on top of CentOS.

HTTPS is a small island of security in this insecure world, and in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason not to have it on every Web site you host. Up until last year, there was just a single last excuse: purchasing certificates was kind of pricey.

In recent years, hardware virtualization has become commonplace in the computing industry and more available to end users. The idea behind it is a noble one. Why invest in allocating more server hardware and not utilize it to its full potential, when instead you can consolidate it all onto one or a few servers and share their resources?

SUSE Manager is a open-source IT management solution with a centralized console for managing multiple Linux distributions, hardware platforms (x86, IBM Power Systems and z Systems),

At some point, you probably have installed or configured a piece of software on a server or desktop PC. Since you read Linux Journal, you've probably done a lot of this, as well as developed a range of glue shell scripts, Perl snippets and cron jobs.

I love Linux, and if you're reading this, chances are you do too. To be honest though, some aspects of the Linux environment are confusing. Near the top of the list for me is the profile system.

Last month, the Ceph community released its first set of bug fixes to the 10.2 Jewel release with version 10.2.1.