Occasionally you just want a bit of piece of mind about your server or Linux install. You may suspect there is somebody who has hacked your server or even something changed by a package install that shouldn’t have been. Heres a couple of ideas on how to do a quick ‘health’ check on he md5sum [...]
Archive for the ‘linux administration – tips, notes and projects’ Category
Validating Package Consistency by md5sum for Linux
Posted: 24th April 2012 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsTags: rpm, security
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Linux Protip: How to make a patch file
Posted: 17th February 2012 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsTags: code
I’ve been doing Linux system administration for well over ten years, and I’ve used patch files often. I’ve never actually had the need to create one until today. To my surprise, I discovered how blatantly simple and easy it is. I’ve always assumed it was some sort of black magic involving unicorns and rainbows. Sure, [...]
unhackable.org offers legacy KSplice protection
Posted: 28th January 2012 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsUnhackable Security is a Linux security consulting firm specializing in a wide array of technologies and proven practices which make your server virtually unhackable. Ksplice is an extension of the Linux kernel which allows system administrators to apply security patches to a running kernel without having to reboot the operating system. Ksplice takes as input [...]
Firefox 9 Released – How to install on Ubuntu
Posted: 20th December 2011 by kire in firefox plugins, linux administration - tips, notes and projectsFirefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome’s [...]
Writing Python code to use MySQL
Posted: 6th December 2011 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsPython is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. I’ve been programming primarily in Python lately, and had the need to open a socket to a MySQL database to pull data. By default, older versions of Python does not currently have a mySQL library that can easily [...]
Find the fastest DNS resolver near you
Posted: 23rd September 2011 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsI recently stumbled upon an awesome tool called Namebench. Namebench it’s a small program wrote in python that search for the fastest DNS server near to you. Namebench runs benchmarks using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. Namebench is completely free and does not modify [...]
creating a patch file from git
Posted: 16th September 2011 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsI’m a huge fan of the oldschool “patch” command, and sometimes in the wild I use Gitorious’ “raw diff” view which puts the changes in easy to read patch format. However, you can also do this on the command line to create a patch file that can be applied using “patch -p0 < patchfile”. git [...]
Howto: Install Firefox 6 on Ubuntu via PPA
Posted: 26th August 2011 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsI just upgraded to Firefox 6 on Ubuntu. The new version doesn’t have any major interface changes but is 20% faster than Firefox 5. Startup time has also been improved especially for those like me with a lot of tabs and groups. Firefox 6 uses about 8% less resources than the older version so it [...]
How to migrate a Virtuozzo VPS to OpenVZ
Posted: 18th August 2011 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsTo migrate from Virtuozzo VPS to OpenVZ you must “rsync” root area to private area to avoid incompatibility of OpenVZ and Virtuozzo Cache Templates. 1. Create your VPS with id 3 using your desired template (for example) # vzctl create 3 –ostemplate ubuntu-11.04-x86_64 –conf unlimited Creating container private area (ubuntu-11.04-x86_64) Performing postcreate actions Saved parameters [...]
Full Graphite and statds installation on CentOS
Posted: 12th August 2011 by kire in linux administration - tips, notes and projectsGraphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. We use it to graph all sorts of metrics. Basically, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite’s processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in Graphite’s specialized database. The data can then be visualized [...]