At work, we have a Netgear ReadyNAS 1100. It’s a 4TB NAS appliance, a cute little 1U half-depth Linux box with 4 SATA disks, a RAID controller, and some firmware to do a whole bunch of fancy stuff (mainly geared towards consumers and very small shops - all configuration is …

I spend a fair amount of my time debugging network and service problems on a few racks of Linux servers. Of course, they’re located in a data center (yes, just downstairs, but still not quite as comfortable as my office), and they’re all command-line only - no sense in …

I’ve had the need to find out the actual username of someone logged in and working as root (via sudo su -) to put it into a subversion commit message. This quick little bash script does the trick, and just echos the username.

#!/bin/bash

PID=$$ # get PID of current …

While I know this isn’t best practice, since we use LDAP-based auth for our Linux boxes (including a sudoers file based on LDAP group membership), we usually do work on some boxes as root (sudo su -). This includes our puppetmaster, where configs are kept in subversion and edited …

Yes, I know I haven’t posted anything useful in a while. I’ve been quite busy at work, and hopefully I’ll post some of my DHCP stuff. In the meantime…

I’m starting a project for the ambulance corps migrating two Linux boxes to a single new server …

We were seeing some strange behavior with Mac client machines on the network lately, specifically with DNS queries (I’d guess that a lot of it has to do with Bonjour), but the discussion touched on the DNS Changer trojan for Mac. I’d really never heard about it before …

So in the first bit of good news lately, after four years as a part-timer, this Monday I start my full-time position at Rutgers as a Linux SysAdmin. Not really anything different - same office, same work, just another day a week and a pay bump (plus benefits and all that …

Note for non-technical readers (not that I expect there to be many). The title of this post includes the word “hacker”. If you think that has anything to do with illegal acts or unethical behavior, you’ve fallen victim to what happens when the mainstream media latches on to a …

Here’s a little tidbit that I never knew until I had an Apache2 name-based virtual host problem: httpd -S lists the vhosts that are being served by Apache, and how they were parsed from the config files.

The output on one of my servers looks something like:

[root@web2 …

Before I even get into how to do this, be warned: this is a really bad idea unless you can ensure total physical access control to the machine. About the only place I’d ever use it is in a non-networked embedded system in a secure location. Its original intent …