I use iSCSI from a giant ZFS storage pool in order to setup virtual machines. There's a couple advantages to this, as you get the power of ZFS snapshots and the ability to grow your virtual machine's disks fairly easily. To make administrating things a bit easier, I use one large iSCSI target and put LVM on top of this. So really this article will apply to anyone that wants to use logical volumes for their disks, which is much preferred over using files.

I'm going to be describing this process using Fedora, but any Linux that is using iscsiadm should use the same sort of configurations. To start off make sure you have the proper packages installed.

Here I show how to setup a secure SSH server that could be used for SFTP. It limits the users to what they can do and what commands they have access to. Could even be configured as a way to allow ssh tunneling for your friends/family who don't have the ability to do this themselves. The chroot jail stops the users from getting access to anywhere else on the system and keeps you from worrying about users messing around with key system components.

I've decided to start a little mini-series here on how to secure a LAMP environment. For those that don't know this is a Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP environment. This week I'll look at Apache specifically and continue with the other parts of this environment early next month. Click the link below to check it out.

Hardening an Apache Server

When setting up an Apache server on a Debian host, you should tweak a few things to prevent malicious users from breaking into your system. Here I discuss my takes on what steps to take to reach this goal.

So, I got pretty fed up with the Ralink RA2860 wireless card that comes with my ASUS Eee 901. It does not play well with Backtrack 3 nor does it do packet injection. I want to turn this thing into a nice little security machine that I can bring with me and easily start testing some networks.

So today Adobe AIR came out of beta for Linux. That is great news because I also came across the Pandora Desktop (currently in beta) in the same day. These two complement each other very well. It is great for removing that one Firefox window or tab that I always have open to Pandora. Click read more below to check out some screenshots.

I've got an ASUS Eee PC 901/Linux with the solid state drive (SSD). I've been having issues with the /tmp dir and /var/log dir utilizing too much of my 4GB drive. So to fix this I came across this eeeuser.com thread which talks about moving those directories to RAM. The process is pretty straight forward and will increase the life of your SSD. Find out what I did below.

People are lazy when it comes to regularly backing up their data. This is a project of mine that I use on a daily basis. It's a fairly simple to setup backup server that uses rsync over SSH to backup anything you give it. Best part about it is that it is cross platform compatible and can be scripted to backup multiple PCs at once. This is an very flexible way of creating a backup system and best of all is entirely open source and free.

In order to switch from one operating system to another it does take some time and effort. Over the passed roughly 6 months I've used Ubuntu as my primary OS. This is not as simple of a switch as you may think especially if you've been using Windows all your life. In the passed Linux was not very end-user friendly and sort of difficult to get into. Today, Ubuntu makes switching over extremely easy. By default it comes with almost all the software you really need in order to be productive. Getting things like music, videos, and other media to play doesn't take much effort either.