goozbach's Techtips

This image is the basis of a coming blog entry or guruguide

I took the time to update the movement table to use the new GuruLabs KeyCaps font. Check it out
here

The Red Hat Network, or RHN for short, is a powerfull centralized administration system created by Red Hat for their product RHEL. It has saved me on various occasions. Managing a large number of Linux systems becomes very easy when RHN is involved. The problem is, RHN is only available for RHEL. To manage systems which are using Fedora Core or other distrubutions. I've decided to start ambitious path and create a system availble to all yum-capable distros.

Introducing YUMAMP. This project has been knocking around in my head for the past couple weeks. I finally decided to jump to it and start getting to work on it. And here's the best part... YOU can help. Check out the current project page here and see if you have some of the skills that could be used to make this project a reality. If you think you'll have some time and/or skills to put towards this project please email me: derek at gurulabs dot com with the subject line yumamp. Thank you and goodnight.

Understanding the initialization process of your Linux distro is quite important, as the boot sequence is where the majority of problems occur. It's also very useful to know and understand how to create or modify a System-V init script for dealing with starting and stopping of services.

VI or VIM... there is a name which will inspire hope or despair in the hardiest of the command line jockies. I have adopted as my goal to teach the layperson the beneifits of learning the big VIM monster, and here are some of the tricks and tools I've come across

Host security is a very important topic. You want to keep your machine as secure as possible. One security principle that most overlook is the "Principle of Least Privilege." This principle states that you should only give sufficent security access to a user to allow them to get their job done, but no more. There have been many different tools, ideas, and practices created to help stick to this principle. (eg su, sudo, PAM etc) I'm going to show you two very powerfull tools/ideas that will vastly improve your security by limiting certian accounts, while still maintaining sufficent access as to not restrict functionality. I'm first going to introduce you to scponly. Then I'll demonstrate a cool PAM trick to create a "su only" user.

Ever wanted to do multiple concurrent GUI logins ala "fast user switching" in Windows XP? It's really not that hard.

These instructions assume you are using GDM as your display manager. The file paths are written assuming that you are using a RedHat based distro.

Lets say you want to add "disable = yes" after specific two lines in a file.

For example, the two lines:

service finger
{


The "N" command to sed tells it to read another line into the "input buffer" you can stack multiple "N"s if you need more than 2 lines.

So, the answer is:

sed -i -e N -e "s/service finger\n{/service finger\n{\n\tdisable = yes/g" /path/to/file-to-be-edited

To read 3 lines you would do something like:

sed -i -e N -e N -e N -e "s/changethis/tothis/g" /path/to/file-to-be-edited


These Guru Labs blogs where created to allow us instructors to share information that was historically shared via internal mailing lists. There has been a large number of very interesting and powerful tips/tricks, as well as funny/usefull websites. I have personally combed the archives of these mailing lists and have compiled quite a list of URLS.

Don't get alarmed, I'm not being demeaning. TWIT is just an acronym. An acronym that has made me all sorts of (howdy Brent) excited!!! Why am I excited? Well let me tell you. TWIT stands for This Week In Tech. A podcast which talks about many different aspects of technology today. This podcast features guests that share their views, a site of the week, and have a generally geeky good time. You may be wondering, "Why then is this such a good podcast?" or thinking, "I've heard of a miriad of podcasts like this." Let me explain my overjoyment.