Stephen Reese

Resizing Xen guest parition based filesystems

This post assumes you are running the Xen hypervisor and are using a partitions based filesystems for you Xen guest you would like to re-size. I have previously written on Installing Xen on CentOS 6 from source and another blog entry that describes how to create partition based Xen guests …

Creating Debian guests on Xen using parition based filesystem

This guide describes how to create a filesystem and guest for the Xen hypervisor. This assumes you have a working Xen install with Dom U. I have described setting up a Xen hypervisor from source in another posted titled Installing Xen on CentOS 6 from source. Create a partition to …

Installing Xen on CentOS 6 from source

I recently had a need to install Xen hypervisor on CentOS and most of the guides covered using the package maintainers version. Further, RHEL distributions favor using KVM. I did come across HowTo: Install XEN Dom0 on CentOS 6 from source but the domain was blocked (Google cache made quick …

How-to setup an Upside-Down-Ternet

In an effort to replicate the amusing idea of a transparent proxy that manipulates traffic in a fun way found here and made even better with some great scripts that you can pull down from here. A Debian box was stood up with two network cards; one connects to the …


Configure SiLK on Linux for NetFlow collection from a Cisco router

This guide walks through configuring SiLK from a source install on a Debian 6 host in order to collect NetFlow data from a Cisco router. The guides here and here written by CERT NetSA are quite good but lack some detail specific to the Debian distribution which required a bit …


Setting up maildrop with Courier MTA

Setting up maildrop with Courier MTA Before I get into the maildrop here are a few notes to myself for setting up Courier. Before running ./configure you should add ssl bin directory to your path To receive local mail indifferent of caps touch {your/etc/courier/dir}locallowercase Account postmaster …

Installing Sun Java on Debian Lenny

The Sun Java JDK is available in the Debian Lenny non-free repository, therefore you must modify /etc/apt/sources.list: $ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list Add non-free to the Debian Lenny repositories: deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ lenny main non-freedeb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ lenny main non-free …

Debian Backup Script

The script is located here. It can update the software repository, backup the file system, and send the backup to another machine via SSH. Feel free to try it out and let me know if you have any issues. Shell script to update Debian system via APT. Backup systems and …

Kicking a user off a linux system

This might break something the user is doing. You have been warned. last -i1 baduser | awk '{print $3;exit}' | xargs -p --replace iptables -A INPUT -s {} -j drop if [ "`who | grep $1`" != "" ] ; then sid=`ps -jU $1 | awk '{print $3}' | tail -1`" kill -HUP $sid echo "$1 was logged in …

Authenicating kerberos against active directory

Your /etc/pam.d/system-auth is created with the command “authconfig” on a RHEL5 machine though you may have to manually edit it with other distributions: #%PAM-1.0# This file is auto-generated. # User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run. auth required /lib/security/$ISA/pam_env.so …

Running processes in the background on Linux

If you just want your program to simply run in the background, launch it with a “&” at the end of the command from the shell. However, if it expects to use stdout, stdin, or stderr, it will stop — so these must all be redirected to files or pipes. This will …

Getting Samba to play nicely with SELinux on RHEL

This helpful bit was written by Don Meyer. I am a little too stubborn for a quick fix like this, so I went the route of adding the specific rules needed to allow SMB/Winbindd to run without throwing AVC errors. I am doing this on RHEL4 boxes, which install …