One of the best monitoring software packages available for system administrators is Nagios. It's free, open source, has a large community of developers and users for support and can be relied upon to provide outstanding monitoring for mission critical devices. As part...
Puppet is the most well-known configuration management tool in the DevOps world and used by systems administrators to centrally manage large numbers of servers and computer systems. There are several Puppet quickstart guides online. However, these guides are...
Recently I explained how to easily set up communication between a Puppet client and master. In this follow up post I’ll outline the steps involved in configuring the Puppet master to control the client machine. Starting out with Puppet does not have to be a...
Now it's time to look at some of the server side configurations. The first step is to configure reverse proxy for the HTTP services. These services live on hosts that sit in the DMZ. A proxy is very simple to configure and allows a lot of flexibility to grow over time...
These days, everything is moving to virtual. Virtual reality, virtual machines, and with Docker, virtual filesystems. Actually, Docker is not virtual, it's very real and is a very convenient way to package an entire filesystem and run it on any supported system. Why...
This week we take up the topic of creating IBM Rational patch install areas for pre-7.1 versions. As we have discussed in previous weeks, there are a number of tools in Rational 7.1 and beyond that introduce much automation into patch management. However, there are...
This week we continue on the topic of installing using IBM Installation Manager. But with a bit of a difference. Instead of bringing up the IM install GUI and using it to conduct the installation, we will take a step toward greater installation automation and create...
In this week’s blog entry, we want to have a look at how Unix and Windows groups work together in a mixed Unix/Windows environment. This topic can sometimes be a bit confusing, and here we hope to contribute to clarifying the subject. Many companies and development...
(Originally published in 2012, updated January 2022.) One of the common tasks for any system administrator is managing disk space on a server. A common question is how to increase disk space on a linux system. I won't go into a boring lecture on why managing disk...
Linux continued to perform well as an alternative server platform in 2012 and RedHat has maintained its position as a reliable and trusted Linux distribution. This reliance on Linux based servers is likely to increase during 2013...
Predictions are hard to make in any area of life, however short term forecasting is not impossible. Ask a meteorologist for the weather in the next twenty-four hours and you will get a fairly accurate prediction. Ask for the outlook over the next 30 days and you will...
As the push towards the cloud continues, the inertia of its popularity can leave CTOs with the impression that the world is black and white with only two options: in the cloud or not in the cloud. The nuances and diversity of solutions can therefore be lost in the...
