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IBM's Websphere MQ is a middle-ware application that allows two applications to pass messages back and forth without having to integrate with each-other directly. Websphere MQ is a fairly popular application in the enterprise especially for those running many java based programs. Today's article is a copy of my personal Websphere MQ cheat sheet. This cheat sheet is geared more from a System Administrators prospective and doesn't touch much on creating or altering queues or channels, but should provide a good head start for those who need to just get something restarted....

When it comes to package management on Red Hat based systems Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is my preferred method. It's a quick and easy way of installing desired rpm's and their dependencies as Yum will automatically resolve dependencies before installation. Most Red Hat base distributions include a public facing Yum repository that you can configure yum to use in order to save from having to maintain a local copy of every package on each system....

For today's article I am going to explain how to create a basic firewall allow and deny filter list using the iptables package. We will be focused on creating a filtering rule-set for a basic everyday Linux web server running Web, FTP, SSH, MySQL, and DNS services. Before we begin lets get an understanding of iptables and firewall filtering in general. What is iptables? iptables is a package and kernel module for Linux that uses the netfilter hooks within the Linux kernel to provide filtering, network address translation, and packet mangling....

Today's article may be pretty basic for regular readers but hopefully some may find it useful. This article will cover creating a crontab entry and show some examples of common crontabs. The Cron daemon is a service that runs on all main distributions of Unix and Linux and specifically designed to execute commands at a given time. These jobs commonly refereed to as cronjobs are one of the essential tools in a Systems Administrators tool box....

In one of the first posts of this blog I covered some basic SystemTap functionality from an email that I sent to members of my team, but I have always felt that I haven't given SystemTap as thorough of an article as this incredible tool deserves. Today I want to correct that. For today's article I will show how to compile SystemTap scripts on one server while running the compiled module on a production server without installing debug-info or devel packages in production....