Extend logrotate for additional log files

Posted on 2018-04-03 by Gerhard

The Linux operating system consists of many different components. Many of them log their activity directly or indirectly into log files. Over time those log files grow and would eventually fill up the disk if there wasn’t a utility like … Continue reading →

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Manage SELinux boolean policies

Posted on 2018-03-05 by Gerhard

Configuring a new service often means dealing with SELinux. The easiest way is most of the time to set an SELinux boolean. But what are SELiunx booleans and what exactly do they do? I will try to shed a little … Continue reading →

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Find and extract one file from rpm package

Posted on 2018-02-09 by Gerhard

Extracting a configuration file (or any other single file) from a package which is not installed is not a standard operation on rpm based systems, but with the following few steps, a file can be extracted without installing the package … Continue reading →

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Auditing Linux system security using lynis

Posted on 2018-01-08 by Gerhard

Lynis is a security auditing tool for UNIX and Linux based systems. It performs a security scan on the system and provides suggestions for best practices for system hardening. The report from lynis shows a lot of suggestions to harden … Continue reading →

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Apache document root in users home directory with SELinux

Posted on 2017-12-11 by Gerhard

Serving web-content from a user’s home directory allows the user to conveniently upload files. By default, the apache configuration in many Linux distributions assumes content is uploaded to a single directory owned by the webserver’s user, but it might be … Continue reading →

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Align a partition on a hard disk

Posted on 2017-11-13 by Gerhard

New disks need to be prepared for use. When using a hardware raid like explained in Create hardware raid on HP via hpacucli some partitioning tools even show an error message. To prepare a disk for use, the disk needs … Continue reading →

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Rescue Data from corrupt SD card

Posted on 2017-10-23 by Gerhard

SD cards are used in a variety of devices like digital cameras. Many times SD cards get removed from the devices, connected to a PC and reconnected back to the device. At some point, the SD card might be removed … Continue reading →

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Mount raw image of entire disc

Posted on 2017-10-02 by Gerhard

Raw disc images are very common, they include things like images created using dd for backups and virtual machine disk images. To access the disc image content means the disk image needs to be mounted. Images from a partition can … Continue reading →

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Testing environment setup using Vagrant

Posted on 2017-09-11 by Gerhard

Setting up a test environment with many different operating systems and versions can be a time consuming task. Installing the different operating systems and configuring them for tests or development can take up a lot of time. Vagrant makes this … Continue reading →

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Create hardware raid on HP via hpacucli

Posted on 2017-08-21 by Gerhard

Configuring a new hardware raid on a HP server can be done comfortably from the Linux command line without restarting the server. HP provides a small command line tool for this job. The following shows how this tool can be … Continue reading →

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