Source: Linux Insider - Posted by Eckie Silapaswang
Plat'Home's latest product, OpenBloks is a pint-sized Linux server that weighs in at a measly 225 grams. It's not much bigger than a deck of cards, but it can run many of the same server applications full-sized machines run. It's ideal for many surveillance and automation processes that rely heavily on reliability.
Check out this article for an interesting look into alternatives for huge rack-mount, power-eating servers. What do you feel are the postivies and negatives for this implementation of Linux servers?
This mini-howto explains how to set up an SSH server on Debian Etch with public-key authorization (and optionally with disabled password logins). SSH is a great tool to control Linux-based computers remotely. It's safe and secure.
There's no warranty that it'll work for you. All of these settings are applicable for Debian and -like systems! There may be slightly changes on other systems as well.
Know your role and your SSH! There's nothing like a concise HowTo on getting things done, and in this case you can get your SSH woes out of the way with this article. Check one of our feature stories by Ryan W. Maple for an even more in depth view SSH best practices!
Source: SearchEnterpriseLinux.com - Posted by Eckie Silapaswang
While Microsoft's Active Directory (AD) is an effective play to circumvent the inherent central authentication foibles of Linux, getting the technology synced with servers has been a complex undertaking for IT practitioners, to say the least.
Integrating with Windows eventually has to happen since there is no denying the majority. However, there are obvious open source secure solutions to authentication with Windows - LDAP and Kerberos along with a touch of Samba can go a long way in providing that type of solution. Read on for a devil's advocate's view of Linux authentication in a Windows environment - do you think these solutions match up to what Microsoft can put out?
PuTTY allows you to use your Symbian-powered mobile device to connect securely to a remote computer no matter where you are located. With this tool you can perform various tasks and I bet many of you would like to be able to control their server from the road, we all know problems occur at the least opportune time.
Guests can never be trusted. Whether they're just anonymous users poking around your server or house guests that never seem to flush the toilet, you can never really entrust the integrity of your system to someone you don't know. Well, how about putting them in a sandbox environment? Not good enough? What about sandbox-within-a-sandbox? Read on to learn about combining the powers of chroot with Unionfs which enables you to put untrusted users into a safe, secure environment where damage is highly mitigated.
When ten plus people are yelling at you at the same time, who do you listen to? It wouldn't matter if everyone was yelling out the scores from yesterday's ball game, however, what if they were yelling about which box / server / service is down? Organize and get your battle plan set by having Nagios sort it all out for you. In fact, make sure everything is working properly with a secured SSH server first and you'll have an easier time bouncing around your network to mitigate any damages.
“Novell has released the first service pack (SP1) for its Suse Linux Enterprise 10 server software, which promises better virtualization and high performance support along with improved security”. Novell is claiming they improved virtualization security, but what is that security? While doing some research I went to the Novell official website I could not find any information stating how they improved virtualization security. Suse Linux virtualization Security; where's the proof?
The last few weeks have seen a dramatic increase in spam (once again). Estimates say that spam makes now up for 80 - 90% of all emails, and many mail servers have difficulties in managing the additional load caused by the latest spam, and spam filters such as SpamAssassin do not recognize large parts of that spam as they did before. Fortunately, we can block a big amount of that spam at the MTA level, for example by using blacklists, running tests on the sender and recipient domains, etc.
Source: ComputerWorld - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
Web sites running Microsoft Corp.'s Web server software are twice as likely to be hosting malicious code as other Web sites, according to research from Google Inc.
Last month, Google's Anti-Malware team looked at 70,000 domains that were either distributing malware or hosting attack code. "Compared to our sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often as a malware-distributing server," wrote Google's Nagendra Modadugu, in a Tuesday blog posting.
Backing up files and directories is relatively easy; databases, however, have some special quirks that you need to address. Our examples use MySQL, but the same principles apply to PostgreSQL and other relational databases.
This article is excerpted from O'Reilly's recently published book Linux System Administration .
