Today I noticed that AWStats, the web traffic analysis tool, had stopped generating valid reports since November 23. After spending about 3 whole hours trying to figure out what on earth had happened and having checked all the things that could have gone wrong, I went through all the automatic emails my server had sent…
What I tried to accomplish today was to prevent a system shutdown or reboot or suspend, if a specific process was still running in the background. This might sound pretty useless, but having shut my PC down once again this afternoon while the backup process was still active in the background, I decided to resolve…
They say that by disabling IPv6 things get a bit smoother and faster regarding networking. I don’t really know if this is true, but I guess, if you’ve decided to disable this feature, you probably care to do it the Right Way™. As far as I know, trying to disable IPv6 through anaconda during the…
RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort of cpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use…
Until now I have been creating partition images with Partimage, which has never failed. Another very popular tool nowadays is CloneZilla. This software, which happens to include partimage among various other utilities, has wider filesystem support and a better set of features – taking/restoring backups across the network is supported. The fact that this is…
This is a very interesting article that describes in detail all the required actions a sysadmin should perform in order to effectively remove a user from a Linux system. This checklist mainly focuses on security, covering all aspects of the removal procedure, from the user’s documents to mail aliases, cronjobs, user’s processes etc. Read the…
Today, I revised my logwatch configuration and I decided to use an external parser for the SELinux audits. Logwatch includes such a parser (/usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/audit script), but i tend to prefer seaudit-report, part of the setools-gui package in Fedora. Don’t let the package name confuse you, seaudit-report is a CLI tool.
Linux com has published an intersting article about recovering data after wiping the hard drive. The author describes a successful attempt to recover his lost photographs and videos by using two GPL tools, TestDisk and PhotoRec. It’s good to know that there are free tools out there that can actually do this job right. I…
Another great write-up by Ravi, in which he explains the usage of strace by resolving a common issue with Totem not being able to play encrypted DVDs. Ravi writes in his article: Many times I have come across seemingly hopeless situations where a program when compiled and installed in GNU/Linux just fails to run. In…
Some months ago, I had written a guide about using PartImage to take snapshots of linux partitions either locally or remotely. Some readers had recommended some other tools, as you can see in the comments on that page, since the development of PartImage seems to have stopped (it still works ok for me though). Anyway,…