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March 2, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Books have been written on the subject of awk and sed. Here’s a small sample of commands I put together over the years that are useful for everyday system administration tasks. Most of these tasks …

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Article Archive for February 2015

Ad-Hoc Analysis of /var/log/secure

February 28, 2015 – 9:41 pm
keys_security_lock_01

The /var/log/secure contains a record of authentication and authorization activity on the system. It can be an invaluable resource for the purposes of intrusion detection and prevention. Below are a few simple examples that show how …

Salt Configuration Notes

February 25, 2015 – 12:44 pm
salt crystals

Here are just some random notes on installing and configuring salt-master and salt-minion services. I figured I better write this down before I forget. Most of this is covered in official documentation, but in a very nonchalant …

Installing Salt Minion on RHEL5

February 19, 2015 – 10:38 am
salt_lake_001

As of recently, python26-distribute has been removed from EPEL5 due to lack of support and attempting to install salt-minion on RHEL5 will throw a dependency error. If you are still running RHEL5, you would need …

Salt Snippets

February 17, 2015 – 10:12 pm
Spoon_Salt_Sugar_Black_Pour_1920x1200

SaltStack has decent documentation (at least compared to Puppet), but it’s a bit lacking on examples. There’s plenty of simple stuff that is useful if you’re managing a handful of nodes. However, why would you …

Late Night Rant #25b

February 17, 2015 – 5:41 pm
istock-18586699-monkey-computer

No sooner than I stopped complaining about HP’s “holy” Web site, I ran into a similar issue with Red Hat’s site. And that doesn’t happen very often. Unlike HP, Red Hat folks tend to take better …

Late Night Rant #25: HP’s Web Site Fail

February 12, 2015 – 6:24 pm
fail

I’ve already mentioned my dislike for the epic mess of broken links HP gingerly called its Web site. Nearly a year-and-a-half later the situation did not improve. Actually, it might have gotten worse.

Memory Utilization-by-User

February 10, 2015 – 5:13 pm
ram_memory_chip-wallpaper-1280x720

Here’s a useful one-liner (sort of) that will show you memory utilization details by user ID on Linux (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS) systems. This may come in handy when trying to figure out who is eating …