Today the Cfengine team from Oslo released version 3.4.0 of Cfengine (3). If you read my article in the German Linux Magazine issue 11/2012, you’d know that this version is really amazing The community edition of Cfengine 3.4.0 now contains POSIX ACL support for both Windows and Linux platforms. Furthermore the remote syslog support is [...]

Recently, I had to use Ntop to analyze the network traffic of one customer file server. Ntop shows the traffic per interface and there per protocol, source IP and offers many other ways of showing you what happens in your network. Ntop is great; however, I observed this tool taking many system resources since it [...]

At the end of October, I passed the RHCE exam here in Germany. It was a very pleasant experience and I used the book “RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide (Exams EX200 & EX300)” from Michael Jang for preparation. On 1072 pages, Jung covers all the objectives of both the RHCSA and RHCE exams. [...]

During the last days, the official Xen blog published two really amazing articles about Xen virtualization in detail. Both of them take a look at paravirtualization, HVM and the difference between 32 and 64 Bit guests. You can find part one of the article series here: The Paravirtualization Spectrum, part 1: The Ends of the [...]

Am 2. November 2012 erscheint in Deutschland offiziell die aktuelle Ausgabe des Linux Magazins. Darin enthalten ist u.a. mein Artikel über Cfengine 3.4.0 und die Neuerungen in der Community Edition, der vor allem das neue Posix-ACL-Feature näher beleuchtet.   Ich bedanke mich herzlichst beim Linux Magazin für die erneute Gelegenheit, einen Artikel in dieser Zeitschrift [...]

Today I added three more cheat sheets: LPIC-1 Module 101 LPIC-2 Module 102 RHCSA All of them are partly in German and were copied from my private Wiki. I hope you find them useful and please let me know if you have any feedback for me.

One of the most common tasks of a Linux sysadmin (or DevOp) might be setting file permissions and ownerships. In this blog I’ll show you how you can do that in a very simple but effective way with Cfengine 3. Writing the Cfengine 3 code for setting file permissions and ownerships body common control { [...]

In my last blog post about Cfengine 3 we talked about how Cfengine 3 can check for you if an user exists or not. Today we will have a look at a very simple way of how a new user can be created if it doesn’t already exist. Writing the Cfengine 3 code for creating [...]

Often there is a need to add new users after deploying a new Linux box. In my case, I often have to add an user which takes care of the monitoring stuff (e.g. owning the Nagios plugins and executing them). The following little Cfengine 3 code snippet should help you to determine if a specific [...]

Sometimes it is necessary to create new symlinks. The following code snippet shows you how to do that with Cfengine 3. Please note that there are several ways of achieving our goal, but the following one should be the most efficient one when you only want to set one symlink. Writing the Cfengine 3 code [...]