While working as a sysadmin over the years, you truly start to understand the importance of security patches. On a semi-daily basis I see compromised servers that have landed in an unfortunate situation due to lack of security patching or insecure program execution (e.g. running a program as root unnecessarily). In this blog post I’ll […]
SSH is a common system administration utility for Linux servers. Whether you’re running CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, or anything in between; if you’ve logged into a Linux server before, you likely have at least heard of it. The acronym SSH stands for “Secure Socket Shell”, and as the name implies, the protocol is built with security […]
Don’t be afraid to use IPv6, It’s not a whole lot different from IPv4. IPv6 Basics Taking a first look at IPv6 can be overwhelming, but in reality, the addressing scheme is exactly the same as IPv4. For example, it would be possible to write an IPv4 address as FFFF:FFFF, which would equate to 255.255.255.255. […]
Many of us work with spreadsheets every day. It’s what allows us to deal with multiple projects at once, each with reams of data. A spreadsheet helps us tame this data — and the better the spreadsheet is laid out and designed, the more it can help us be efficient when processing this data. Since […]
Although you may salivate at the thought of a fine-dining experience and indulging in a perfectly seared, dry-aged steak, chances are you’re not about to purchase a tract of land and some cattle. The same can be said for dedicated servers — even though your business requires high-end hosting, you might not want to take […]
Introduction to MySQL MySQL Replication using Binary Log File Position, as opposed to Global Transaction Identifiers(GTID), uses binary logs, relay logs, and index files to track the progress of events between the master and slave databases. GTID can be used in conjunction with binary/relay logs, however, starting with an understanding of binary log file position […]
If you’re running a Linux server and you value uptime and stability, this server maintenance guide will help keep you on track. It’s best to perform maintenance and checks on a regular basis for various reasons. It’s not fun being a sysadmin and finding out that a downtime causing issue could have been easily prevented. […]
Docker is a container management platform and is a rather new way of thinking about administration. It’s a tool to manage containers, and GigeNET mainly uses containers to manage processes on an individual level. Let’s take a step back to discuss what a container consists of. Containers are a method of virtualization much like virtual […]
The Shell… A cloudy mystery for the novice, but an indispensable tool for any seasoned administrator. It is the underlying foundation in any operating system, and if used to its maximum potential, can be extremely effective. You might be wondering, why is the command line considered useful? cPanel has almost every function you’d need for […]
Qubes OS is a distribution of Linux with security as its focus, and it does it very well. At its core it’s based on Fedora and utilizes the Xen hypervisor to achieve security by isolation. Qubes can take a bit to get used to and it has its quirks but generally works quite well and […]