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Creating a custom Nagios/Centreon passive alerter
Scenario: This is very probably a familiar problem that any sysadmin must solve: Using your monitoring setup to receive alerts from other servers. Note the highlighted "receive". This is different from...
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Bringing IPv6 to the home : Part 1
World IPv6 day came and went, but for most of us nothing much changed. In Malta especially, there currently seems no interest for ISPs to start using IPV6, very probably due to the challenges it poses....
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Bringing IPv6 to the home : Part 2
The article is a more in-depth look at residential IPv6, the final installment of the 2 part series. If you’ve missed it, the 1st article can be found here. After having established a successful...
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Lessons Learned: Redhat 5.8 + IBM Bladecenter 88524TG + IBM Storwise V7000
Objective: Having a baremetal install of Redhat Enterprise on a blade within the IBM Bladecenter, configure the OS to successfully mount a LUN on the SAN (Storwise v7000) as usable storage. Hardware: -...
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Bash scripting: another use for “DD”
For most linux users, “dd” is mostly used when dealing with disk issues, such as copying one disk to another (byte for byte) creating an ISO from a CD/DVD, and so on. I personally didnt know what else...
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Adding agentless Windows WMI monitoring to Nagios
There are a couple of well documented methods to monitor Windows machines from Nagios. The most popular of these seems to be NRPE. This method works very well, but the biggest downside for me was the...
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Connecting to a Palo Alto Network GlobalProtect Gateway from Linux
Please note: this software has only been officially tested on Ubuntu and CentOS distributions. The VPN software uses community based vpnc software, please direct support questions about the actual...
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Web MeetMe : Conferencing in FreePBX
The company I work for currently uses TrixBox as their VoIP server. It’s an excellent piece of software but being no longer supported, the decision was taken to upgrade to the later and more active...
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Nugget Post : Beyond basic SED
Interesting problem to solve with sed. Given the following file: [firstCompany-1-restricted-internal] exten => _1XX,1,Goto,(from-internal,${EXTEN},1) exten =>...
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Android (SL4A) bluetooth to Linux (ubuntu)
As a follow up to my recent post I tried to program a very basic launcher. The idea is to pass commands from my android phone to my ubuntu laptop. The android side of things was already catered for by...
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Lessons Learned: Setting up TVHeadend for live TV streaming in Malta
I recently had the opportunity of setting up a system which captures free-to-air channels and streams them over IP for use by TV set-top boxes such as RaspBMC (or plain old XBMC). We decided on using...
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Lessons learned: Gephi not starting up
Scenario: When using Ubuntu Trusty (14.04.3LTS) Gephi 0.82 initializes but gets stuck on “Loading Cached Objects” Solution: The default Gephi startup bash script does not correctly initialize the JAVA...
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Proxy re-encryption
What is proxy re-encryption? Proxy re-encryption lets Alice send Bob a message (M) via a semi-trusted proxy, without revealing Alice’s private key to either the proxy or Bob, and without revealing the...
View ArticleSQUID + GreasySpoon : enhancing your proxy deployment with content adaptation
When comparing the two proxy solutions I am most familiar with, these being BlueCoat ProxySG and SQUID, the most striking difference is the capability of the bluecoat to easily change and modify the...
View ArticleEasy cisco syslog monitoring using Webmin
At some point probably a network team would need something similar to this, so I thought it would be a good article to document what I’ve used to achieve this scenario: There is a need to monitor...
View ArticleNugget Post: LPIC-2 material
While hunting for good study material for the LPIC-2 certificate (linux professional institute certification) I came across a very good online book that’s up to date and very structured at the time of...
View ArticleLinux script for automatic notification of failed download
Scenario: We need a CentOS machine to periodically automatically download a file from a remote server on the internet. If this download fails for any reason, the network admin should be emailed to...
View ArticleAnalyzing SQUID access logs
There are loads of programs on the internet which are squid log analyzers. While this article does address the same thing, it’s presented more with an eye to how you can use standard linux bash scripts...
View ArticleNugget Post: LPI 201 exam notes
Just took my LPI 201 exam successfully (LPIC 201). Here are my personal notes taken during my studies and a few added after the exam...
View ArticleTomcat configuration summary
Tomcat is one of the more involving servers to setup. It contains a rather large server.xml file that can be daunting at first. If you “break down” the massive xml file into containers however, it...
View ArticleLinux Mail Components
Drawing diagrams always helps visualize and understand concepts. While studying for LPIC202 I came up with the following diagram to help understand a simple linux mail system. I say simple because the...
View ArticleNugget Post: LPIC 202 exam notes
Just took my LPI 202 exam successfully (LPIC 202). Here are my personal notes taken during my studies and a few added after the exam...
View ArticleMonitoring custom attributes via SNMP
There comes a time in every network admin’s career when management/developers/dbas need to monitor some obscure attribute on a particular server. Invariably, there is no pre-existing plugin in nagios...
View ArticleEntertainment: Asus O’play file share w/ Windows 7
A bit of a different post from the norm since this deals with IT in entertainment rather than the normal work IT, but seems to be a useful. @ Home I do not use any cable, TV or satellite description....
View ArticleLessons Learned: Building statically-linked Rust binaries (OpenSSL)
In a couple of modules which used in CyberSift, Rust is slowly making an appearance, depending on the use-case at hand. Generally we develop in GoLang, and one of the advantages was the resulting...
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