Free Software Linux

Vyatta is a Linux based distro that ease the set up of VPN, Routers, antivirus.... It has a really small footprint on your system as it only requires something like 800M to be installed and is based on Debian. On the top of that, it offers configuration wrappers to facilitate service settings. This tutorial will explain how to set up 2 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) boxes to route the traffic from one Autonomous System (AS) to the other using Vyatta. Vyatta Community Edition 4.1.4 was used during this set up.

Reports are bubbling up that Digg has permanently banned over 80 users for running scripts that help them automatically perform certain tasks on the site.

Bazaar (bzr) is a distributed version control system (VCS) sponsored by Canonical and thus bzr is widely used by the Ubuntu community. Like any vcs, bzr will let you track the different version of your code locally and let you push the changes to a remote server. One cool feature of bzr is that you can maintain a remote copy of your code history without having a bzr server running, nor having a copy of bzr on the remote server running and simply by using ssh to transport the data.

Learn these 10 tricks and you'll be the most powerful Linux® systems administrator in the universe...well, maybe not the universe, but you will need these tips to play in the big leagues. Learn about SSH tunnels, VNC, password recovery, console spying, and more. Examples accompany each trick, so you can duplicate them on your own systems.

Even though new distros installers tend to support filesystem encryption out of the box, most of the time, it might be interesting to actually understand how it works, mainly when it happens that your system fails to boot :). Most literature found on the Internet tend to cover how to set up LVM over a partition encrypted with LUKS, this tutorial takes another approach and will explain how to create LUKS encrypted partitions over LVM. The reason for this.... I wanted to have unencrypted partitions :D. read more

syslogd is the Linux system logging utility that take care of filling up your files in /var/log when it is asked to. On a standard system, logging is only done on the local drive. But syslog can be configured to receive logging from a remote client, or to send logging to a remote syslog server. Some of the use cases could be:

• A machine which filesystem goes read-only
• Log replication

this tutorial will explain how to set up both the server, to receive message from a remote client, and the client to emit messages to a syslogd server. read more

Linux is a perfect platform to act as a router/gateway. In this tutorial, I will explain how to set up a Linux box to operate as a network router. The box will provide the following services:

• DHCP server to provide the ip addresses to the machines in the LAN
• DNS server to resolve domain names
• Gateway with IP tables to give access to the Internet.
• Firewall with IP tables.

The resulting machine will have quite a small footprint: about 600M, and except if your network is intensively used, a low spec computer can be recycled to do the job. As the machine is going to operate as a router/firewall

When copying files over the network, the files informations can be modified. When using cp, one can avoid this issue by using the -a which will do the copy in archive mode, meaning that it will keep the links, preserve mode, ownership and timestamps and the copy is recursive. the solution to this over the network is rsync alongside with ssh. read more

Part two of a five part post series on setting up Linux and Unix servers securely.

In the 2 previous articles, I explained how to set up a serial console on Ubuntu and Debian. This tutorial will now show how to connect to those serial console using another machine using a software called minicom. read more

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Debian Linux. Debian uses sysvinit to handle the booting process, amongst the different task, and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console. A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue. read more

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Ubuntu Linux. Unlike most other distros, Ubuntu uses upstart instead of sysvinit and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console. A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue. read more

SSH is great. There is so many thing you can do with it other than just a remote secure shell like X forwarding, port forwarding, authenticate using a private/public key, compress the transmitted stream.... If you have different account that you use on an every day basis, it becomes quickly cumbersome to type those lengthly command lines. One could work around this by using aliases, the right way would be to use ~/.ssh/config This tutorial will show some customization examples that should cover most ssh use cases. read more

Chainloading an operating system allows grub to boot an opearating system's boot loader. This is commonly used to boot Windows for instance. I personnaly use it to be able to have my "production" system's grub on the MBR, and address other distros'grub install on their root partition. The advantage is that kernel updates are real easy to handle. Each testing distro modifying their own grub won't interfere with my main OS bootloader. This tutorial will explain how to configure grub's menu.lst from the main OS to boot other OSes bootloader through an example. read more

cron-apt is a tool run by a cron job at regular interval that will check for package updates and optionally do some actions. cron-apt will by default download the packages without installing them. This tutorial will explain how to set up cron-apt in order to have it send an email to a specified address when updates are ready to be installed. read more