DeckerD: Drew's Personal Corner of the Web » CentOS

Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions from a Linux Host

Drew — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:37:37 +0000

Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on a Linux host is a straight-forward task which can make life much easier on a guest operating systems, or OS. The Guest Additions install is the equivalent of installing VMWare Tools on a VMWare host (onto a VMWare guest OS). I'll discuss the enhancements of installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions, and will run you through the installation process. A Little Background Information Try going out there on Google or any other search engine and search Read More »

Compiling Duplicity on CentOS 5.x

Drew — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:22:55 +0000

Duplicity, an encrypted backup utility that uses the rsync algorithm, is becoming quite useful for my day to day backups. I've written several backup scripts using rsync, gzip, and other useful backup schemes. Heck, I've even written my own backup subroutines that create a backup structure based of the current date. So, trust me, I usually never change my ways, unless it's something that really intrigues me. Some Background Information I'm still testing some stuff out, however, I'm Read More »

Splunk Free: .htaccess Protection using Apache

Drew — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:29:06 +0000

You ever hear of Splunk? Splunk enables you to search and navigate all your logs and IT data in real time; logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts and metrics. It's an awesome tool to make it easier to monitor and watch your log files. Unfortunately, Splunk is expensive. How expensive? Try $5000 a year, for the cheapest license. Here's the main problem; the free version of Splunk does not come with any user authentication, not even Admin authentication. This means that Read More »

Clearing (but not deleting) log files

Drew — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:22:26 +0000

Sometimes, as a Systems Administrator, or SysAdmin, there are times we need to clear out the log files, without actually deleting them. As a smart Sys Admin, you normally wouldn't need to do this, but as I am currently involved in supporting customers and their Linux machines, I run into some pretty neat stuff (neat as in special). I've had a few issues where someone actually runs out of disk space on / (root filesystem) due to the /var/log directory being full. First off, you might run the Read More »

Curing ‘Symbolic link not allowed’ (Apache 2.0)

Drew — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 20:19:39 +0000

Awhile back when trying to add a directory to Apache on my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server, I ran into some issues. These issues, of course were the infamous 403 "Forbidden" error that your web barfs up when you try to access a server that is not publicly viewable, because of permission issues. I'm going to give you my scenario and explain how you can fix this issue, so that you don't have to go through an hour of throwing your hands up in disgust. The Scenario In our example, out DocumentRoot Read More »