Sysadmin

Logging in into a Linux machine and executing the hundreds commands available is just one of the most common usages of OpenSSH. Another interesting and very useful usage is tunneling some specific (or even all) traffic from your local machine to an external machine you have access to. Today we’ll analyze how to access a certain virtual machine’s console by tunneling the relevant VNC port locally and accessing it through your favorite VNC client. [Read More]

Ever wondered how you can update your website (in our case a static website with a bunch of HTML and PHP files) by committing to a Git repository hosted on a different server? if the answer to the previous question is yes, then you are in the right place. The scenario: Website hosted on server A. Git repository hosted on server B. and a few details about why would you opt for maintaining your website through Git: [Read More]

Lately (as I earlier pointed out on my blog) I’ve been working on improving GNOME’s infrastructure monitoring services. After configuring XMPP it was time to find out a good way for sending out relevant notifications to our IRC channel hosted on GIMPNET. I achieved that with a nice combo: supybot + supybot-notify, all that mixed up with a few grains of Nagios command definitions. But here we go with a little step-by-step guide: [Read More]

As per Wikipedia: Puppet is a tool for managing the configuration of Unix-like systems, declaratively. The developer provides puppet templates for describing parts of the system, and, when these templates are deployed, the runtime puts the managed systems into the declared state. Puppet consists of a custom declarative language to describe system configuration, distributed using the client-server paradigm (using XML-RPC protocol), and a library to realize the configuration. The resource abstraction layer enables administrators to describe the configuration in high-level terms, such as users, services and packages. [Read More]