Author Archives: scott

In a previous post, I summarized an experience with a newfound love – Trustix. Today, I’ll try and detail how to go through this install. First, There is a special 30 meg network-based installation ISO image for 3.0 in the download area called trustix-3.0-net.i586.iso. It includes the PXEboot support files. However, if you download this [...]

It finally dawned on me the other day – that instead of trying to install what most distributions call a minimal install (500+ Meg) and then trying to figure out what all I can remove afterwards, how about starting with a distribution that truly is minimal and then adding only what I need afterwards. I [...]

If I came home and told my wife that I started ‘folding’ today – she would ask me why I don’t do it at home. I had never heard of ‘Folding’ before recently discovering it on hackaday.  However, it looked very interesting so I began investigating. What is Folding? Folding@home is a distributed client computing [...]

What a waste, pictured below is a rack almost completely full of Cisco equipment that gets hardly used ever. The original intent was to use for CCIE study, which by the way has all the equipment needed for that, but is currently not being used. SSH access is available to this rack from the internet. [...]

If you have a Cisco PIX 515 and want to upgrade to the new 7.0 software, you are required to upgrade memory first. By default, the pix comes with 64Mb memory unless you buy a unit after the 7.0 software became generally available. What I am about to describe is by no means a recommendation [...]

Last Article – I went through the basic installation of installing CentOS 4.2 using the single Server Install CD. Since this machine was to be used on the Internal network and I didn’t really want the performance overhead of a host based firewall – I decided to not enable the firewall during the installation. Note: [...]

I am writing this as a series. This particular article will discuss just the operating system installation. I will follow with some add-on articles that deals with setting up a centralized log host. The server used in this project is a Dell 1650 with (2) PIII 1.2 Processors and 2G of Ram. Disk configuration is [...]

In this world of auditing and compliance, if you don’t have policies documented to change anything that is remotely related to a system password on a regular basis – I would highly encourage you to give it serious consideration.

Let’s say you have a bunch of Windows Servers in your Data Center running the SNMP service. Let’s also say that they are running the < *gulp*> default community strings. It is definately time to change them.

This script will help you automate this process.

Since my ‘Core’ installation document was getting pretty big, I decided to create a second document listing additional applications that may be needed for your particular use. The intent here is to show how to install just what is needed for any one application. So, by using the minimal install of Fedora plus any specific [...]

I was recently asked to evaluate the SolarWinds products, specifically Orion Performance Monitor and the Network Management Tools (Engineer’s Edition). Below is my experience: