Linux Tips, Hacks, Tutorials, And Ideas In Blog
Linux Tips, Hacks, Tutorials, And Ideas In Blog
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is well known to set defaults across the industry. For example, RHEL pushed systemd so hard that all other Linux distro adopted for good or bad reasons. Now Red Hat announced that KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE) been deprecated from RHEL 7.6 and all future version of RHEL.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.5 released. This version includes updates and various improvements such as GNOME rebased to version 3.26, LibreOffice rebased to version 5.3, Support for libva (VA-API) added, GStreamer now supports mp3 and more. RHEL is one of the leading enterprise Linux distribution for both bare metal and cloud platform. It targeted toward the commercial users. RHEL works with x86-64, IBM System z, and other platforms.
Linux/Unix sysadmins have a weird obsession with server uptime. There is a xkcd comic devoted to this subject where a good sysadmin is an unstoppable force that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.
One can tell how long the Linux system has been running using the uptime command or w command or top command. I can get a report of the historical and statistical running time of the system, keeping it between restarts using tuptime tool. Like uptime command but with the more impressive output. Recently I discovered another tool called uptimed that records statistics about a machine’s uptime. Let us see how to get uptime record statistics using uptimed and uprecords on Linux operating system.
Fedora Linux version 26.0 has been released ( jump to download ) after many months of constant development and available for download in various media format. Fedora 26 is a free and open source operating system includes various new features such as GCC 7, Golang 1.8, Python 3.6, DNF 2.0, OpenSSL 1.1.0 and more. Fedora 26 runs on both ARM servers and desktop boards too.
There is a serious vulnerability in sudo command that grants root access to anyone with a shell account. It works on SELinux enabled systems such as CentOS/RHEL and others too. A local user with privileges to execute commands via sudo could use this flaw to escalate their privileges to root. Patch your system as soon as possible.
Recently I came across an excellent software called CoreFreq. It is a CPU monitoring software designed for 64-bits Processors w/ architectures Intel Atom, Core2, Nehalem, SandyBridge and superior, and AMD Family 0F. It runs on 64 bit Linux system. CoreFreq provides a framework to retrieve CPU data with a high degree of precision:
Entropy is nothing but the measure of “randomness” in a sequence of bits. The PRNG ( pseudorandom number generator ) is a special device (e.g. /dev/random on Linux) to create randomness from server hardware activities. It uses interrupts generated from the keyboard, hard disk, mouse, network and other sources. The random number generator gathers environmental noise from device drivers and other sources into an entropy pool. The randomness usually used for security purposes like creating TLS/SSL keys and the quality source of random bits is critical. For example, OpenSSL APIs can use quality randomness to make your program cryptographically secure. However, a poor source of randomness could result in loss of security. In this post, I will cover haveged and rng-utils/rng-tools to generate random numbers and feed linux random device for your virtual or dedicated Linux server.
Two factor authentication is increasingly becoming a strongly recommended way of protecting user accounts in web applications from attackers by requiring a second method of authentication in addition to the standard username and password pair.
Although two factor authentication can encompass a wide range of techniques like biometrics or smart cards, the most commonly deployed technique in web applications is the one time password. If you have used applications like Gmail, you are probably familiar with the one time password generated by the Google Authenticator app that’s available on iOS or Android devices.
The algorithm used for the one time password in the Google Authenticator app is known as the Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) algorithm. The TOTP algorithm is a standard algorithm approved by the IETF in (RFC 6238) totp-rfc.
Today I will be talking about ansible, a powerful configuration management solution written in python. There are many configuration management solutions available, all with pros and cons, ansible stands apart from many of them for its simplicity. What makes ansible different than many of the most popular configuration management systems is that its agent-less, no need to setup agents on every node you want to control. Plus, this has the benefit of being able to control you entire infrastructure from more than one place, if needed. That last point’s validity, of being a benefit, may be debatable but I find it as a positive in most cases. Enough talk, lets get started with Ansible installation and configuration on a RHEL/CentOS, and Debian/Ubuntu based systems.
If you want to monitor network throughput on the command line interface, use nload application. It is a console application which monitors network traffic and bandwidth usage in real time. It visualizes the in and outgoing traffic using two graphs and provides additional info like total amount of transferred data and min/max network usage.