Dec 022012
 

Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.

You could do this configuration easily with rsyslog or syslog-ng to send/receive the logs and logrotate to rotate the files locally on your machines, today I want to show you some open source programs that can receive the logs, store them on filesystem or database and analyse them presenting the results via Web dashboards.

These are large applications most suited for big company, or in general to everyone that want to keep and manage a lot of data they are: Apache Flume, Logstash, Greylog2 and Scribe

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Nov 292012
 

raspberry

If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi.

This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the output through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.

The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 128 or 256 Megabytes of RAM, with two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. The board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems and there is a lot of interest on the open source community with many small distro born to support this new hardware such as raspbian, a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware.

Recently the Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM has been announced and put on the market.
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Nov 232012
 

In the past I’ve published some info to enhance the security of your ssh server such as 3 easy steps to strengthen your ssh server or how to use SSH for more secure browsing in public networks, today we’ll take a look at the PAM modules of GNU/Linux and in particular the module ssh and at some options that we can activate to strengthen our ssh server.

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Nov 212012
 

Today I was in need to install 1 single package from the unstable release of Debian in a server installed with the stable release, so what’s the best way to get this done ?

For this example I’ll use the package drush because there are a lot of differences in the versions between the different release of Debian.
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Nov 182012
 

Today I propose to you 7 nice games about driving, they are all open source and freely downloadable.
I’m not a great fan of this genre but I’ve played some of them and they have great graphics, and you’ll not miss what you can find on a Windows Computer.

They are: Vdrift, TORCS, Speed Dreams, Supertuxkart , Racer, Trigger Rally and Stunt Rally

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