Archive
Posts from 2010
How I am going to avoid getting stranded when my car has a dead battery or flat tire
Having lived in a big city for the past 10-years of my life, I've encountered a number of unpleasant things when I've been out and about. A few weeks back I hit one of the most frustrating ones of my life when a nail punctured one my tires while I was running errands. This shouldn't have been an issue, but alas my spare tire was on the low side and I didn't feel comfortable driving with it. With no gas stations in sight the feeling of "oh crap" came over me…
$ read more →Numerous updates to the SSL certificate expiration program
With the help of various contributors, I've integrated some new features and a number of bug fixes to ssl-cert-check over the past couple of months. If you aren't familiar with this tool, it's a bash script that you can use to notify you prior to your certificates expiring. You can read more about the script by surfing over to the ssl-cert-check documentation page.
$ read more →Getting gnome to work after an initial CentOS installation
While preparing for my RHCE exam, I wanted to install of the system-config-* GUIs to see what functionality they provided. I used the yum groupinstall option to install the GNOME desktop: and then proceeded to add my preferred desktop environment to /etc/sysconfig/de sktop: Once these items were installed I ran 'init 5' and was greeted with the following message in /var/log/messages: After reading through various logs and scripts, I noticed that the gdm display manager wasn't installed. I thought groupinstalling the GNOME desktop would force a display manager to be installed, but alas that isn't the case. To get everything working I fired up yum and installed gdm: Everything worked as expected once gdm was installed, and I could fire up the GUIs without issue.
$ read more →What I did to pass the RHCE exam
I took the RHCE exam this past week, and was fortunate to pass both the RHCT and RHCE sections with a score of 100%. While I can't discuss what was on the test, I figured I would share the process I used to prepare for the test. When I decided to take the exam, I picked up a copy of the Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide and read it from cover-to-cover. Michael Jang did a great job with the book, and it shed some light on things I never use (e.g., Linux printing)…
$ read more →Firewalling a Linux NFS server with iptables
When it comes to firewalling services, NFS has to be one of the most complex to get operational. By default the various NFS services (lockd, statd, mountd, etc.) will request random port assignments from the portmapper (portmap), which means that most administrators need to open up a range of ports in their firewall rule base to get NFS working. On Linux hosts there is a simple way to firewall NFS services, and I thought I would walk through how I got iptables and my NFS server to work together. Getting NFS working with iptables is a three step process: Hard strap the ports the NFS daemons use in /etc/sysconfig/nfs…
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