Setup SMART Disk Monitoring
If your disk is going bad no one going to tell you about it until you start hearing it. And if you start hearing issues with your drive it may be too late to backup your data or do anything else you need to do to not be driveless. I’m uncertain why some of this is not available as an install option for more distros but a good warning before the storm can save your data and your sanity.
Continue readingOk, so far we have gone through the hoops to get GNS3 with dynamips/dynagen working nicely in an (almost) fully contained directory in /opt. We then went through choosing an IOS image that is right for you, if you actually have multiple legal images to choose from of course. Now lets setup a pix firewall. The PIX is out of life as far as Cisco is concerned and had been superseded by the ASA line of security devices. But, there are still a lot of the PIX around and the concepts haven’t changed too much between them. So let us go through the motions already!
Continue readingHere is another one that you may find useful to do after a default install of probably any Linux server, Disabling extra stuff from loading at startup. Ubuntu loads a ton of them and many I do not use at all. Since when do you need joystick or sound support on a server anyway? Anyways, here are some I disable and how I disable them.
Continue readingOK, I promised a friend some time ago that I’d post all of my post-install procedures and I’ve not quite followed through with that so I’m doing a few before finishing up my three part post on the “Home Hacker’s Network”. These are all just little hacks I’ve come across and modified to suit my needs. I like this one a bunch as it gives me a nice shell prompt when I login as well as when I use screen (although the gnu screen configuration part is mutually exclusive to the shell modification part).
So lets get started…
Continue readingOn a headless server that you have at home or for testing I like to make sure that all security updates and trivial updates are done automatically. A good sys admin will shy away from this practice for a good reason, updates can mess things up. In a production environment or where the server setup is very complex I can understand the need to manually run updates. For me, well I’m lazy when it comes to my home machines and generally don’t have too complex of setups. Also, in my experience, I’ve hardly ever seen an apt security or trivial update cause any harm (desktop linux I have seen issues though). That being said, I like to force security and trivial updates to happen daily.
Continue reading