Category Archives: Admin

Linux tip: how to enable remote syslog on SLES

Posted on July 27, 2018 by john | 20 views

Intro I write this knowing I still don’t know anything to speak of about syslog, but, sometimes you gotta act without knowing. I needed to send syslog to somewhere in a big hurry so I figured out the absolute minimum … Continue reading →

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The IT Detective Agency: the vanishing certificate error

Posted on April 30, 2018 by john | 42 views

Intro I was confronted with a web site certificate error. A user was reluctant – correctly – to proceed to an internal web site because he saw a message to the effect: I tried it myself with IE and got … Continue reading →

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The IT Detective agency: Some insights into 4096-bit SSL keys

Posted on April 26, 2018 by john | 42 views

Intro I was recently asked if a new certificate a web site is about to deploy would require any changes to our clients such as needing to import this certificate into their Java keystore. The details Well, I saved the … Continue reading →

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A taste of the Instagram API

Posted on April 16, 2018 by john | 38 views

Intro I always want to know more about how things really work behind the scenes, so I was excited when I overheard talk about how one company uses the Instagram API to do some cool things. An API is an … Continue reading →

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Measuring bandwidth on Checkpoint Gaia

Posted on March 21, 2018 by john | 50 views

Intro Sometimes you don’t have the tools you want but you have enough to make do. Such is the case with the command line utilities of the CLI of Checkpoint Gaia. It’s like a basic Linux. The company I consult … Continue reading →

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Linux Tip: too lazy to write a startup script? how to fake it

Posted on January 4, 2018 by john | 44 views

Intro systemd can be pretty formidable to master. Say you have your own little script you like to run but you don’t want to bother with inserting it into the systemd facility. What can you do? The details A simple … Continue reading →

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Server Name Indication and what it means for those with only a single IP address

Posted on October 27, 2017 by john | 90 views

Intro Sometimes everything is there in place, ready to be used, but you just have to either mistakenly try it, or learn it works by reading about it, because it may be counter-intuitive. Such is the case with Server Name … Continue reading →

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Relative time with the linux date command

Posted on October 13, 2017 by john | 168 views

The situation A server in Europe needs to transfer a log file which is written every hour from a server in the US. The filename format is 20171013-1039.log.gz And we want the transfer to be done every hour. How we … Continue reading →

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Fail2ban fails to work, I built my own

Posted on October 8, 2017 by john | 90 views

Intro I’ve sung the praises of fail2ban as a modern way to shutdown those annoying probes of your cloud server. I recently got to work with a Redhat v 7.4 system, so much newer than my old CentOS 6 server. … Continue reading →

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Reverse upper and lower case letters

Posted on August 15, 2017 by john | 77 views

Intro I am a look-at-the-keyboard typist! I can’t count the number of times I’ve begun an email with CAPs lock on, and found a nice correspondence looking like this: hI aNDRES,   i RE-CREATED THE SCRIPT. … Tired of the … Continue reading →

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