One of my biggest pet peeves as a Linux sysadmin is when I see users, or even other sysadmins using kill -9 on the first attempt to terminate a process. The reason this bugs me so much is because it shows either a lack of understanding of the kill command or just plain laziness. Rather than going on a long rant about why this is bad, I wanted to write an article about the kill command and how signal works in Linux....
Today is very much a “back to the basics” kind of day. In this article I am going to cover one of the most basic commands in Linux; the cd command. While today's article might be basic; it is always good even for experienced sysadmins, to look back at some of the basics and see if there are ways to improve your command line skills and Linux knowledge. The Linux/Unix directory structure Before getting into how to change to another directory, let's take a minute to cover how Linux's directory structure is laid out....
Lately if you have been paying attention to tech or even mainstream media you might have seen a few stories about data breaches. Sometimes these data breaches have allowed attackers to gather unencrypted passwords or credit card numbers. In the past these types of attacks still happened, but there was not as many attacks as today and when they happened they were kept secret. With more and more internet based services becoming part of peoples lives, there is even more targets for attackers who are looking to get sensitive data....
Today's article is an item I covered briefly during my presentation at SaltConf 2014 (which was a pretty awesome conference by the way). One of the lesser known features of SaltStack is the ability to configure multiple master servers. Having an additional master server allows for some extra redundancy as well as capacity for large implementations. While I covered the benefits of having an additional master server in my presentation I didn't cover in full detail how to set this up, today I will cover the details of configuring multiple salt masters....
Shell scripting is a fundamental skill that every systems administrator should know. The ability to script mundane & repeatable tasks allows a sysadmin to perform these tasks quickly. These scripts can be used for anything from installing software, configuring software or quickly resolving a known issue. A fundamental core of any programming language is the if statement. In this article I am going to show several examples of using if statements and explain how they work....