Importing and mounting ZFS pools at boot time on Fedora servers
If you read my blog you know I am a huge fan of the ZFS file system. Now that the ZFS on Linux project is shipping with Ubuntu I hope it gets more use in the real world. Installing ZFS on a Fedora server is relatively easy though I haven't found a good guide describing how to import pools and mount file systems at boot. After a bit of digging in /usr/lib/systemd/system/ it turns out this is super easy…
$ read more →Creating Bind query log statistics with dnsrecon
A month or two back I was investigating a production issue and wanted to visualize our Bind query logs. The Bind statistics channel looked useful but there wasn't enough data to help me troubleshoot my issue. In the spirit of software re-use I looked at a few opensource query log parsing utilities. The programs I found used MySQL and once again they didn't have enough data to fit my needs…
$ read more →Installing NVidia binary drivers on an Ubuntu 16.10 desktop
I recently upgraded my Ubuntu 16.10 desktop with an NVidia GeForce 730 graphics adapter. My experiences with the nouveau opensource driver haven't been good so I decided to install the binary drivers from NVidia. Ubuntu makes this process INCREDIBLY easy. To install the latest NVidia drivers you can click the "Search your Computer" icon in the Unity menu, type in "Drivers" and then click additional drivers…
$ read more →Getting more out of your Linux servers with moreutils
I accidentally came across the moreutils package a few years back and the day I did my life changed forever. This package contains some killer utilities and fill some nice gaps in the *NIX tool chain. Here is a list of the binaries in this package (descriptions taken from the man page of each utility): I'm especially fond of errno, chronic and pee. But my favorite utilities have to be ifne and ts…
$ read more →Using Linux auditing to observe program executions and file accesses
Linux systems have a rather nice auditing framework built into the kernel. This framework consists of a kernel component that inspects and filters events and a userland daemon (auditd) that takes the events and archives them to persistent storage. These audit log events can then be searched and summarized with the ausearch and aureport utilities. The following ausearch command will dump all audit records for UID 7005: Each audit event contains the type of event (system call executed, file read, etc.) as well as a bunch of user and system context…
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