This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.The Mentor (http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html) When dial-up ruled There was a time that some of us can still remember. A time before fast networks ruled the industry. When connection speeds over 1mbps were blazing fast, and most of us lived…
My Sysadmin Story
Note: This story was originally written for Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin blog. We’ve all got a story, right? Our lives could be laid out like a script for a movie, or in the chapters of a novel. I don’t know if anyone would read mine, but to the right audience, it might sound familiar, or…
What My Family Thinks I Do For a Living
Note: This was originally written for Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin Blog, https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin The job title “System Administrator” is sometimes vague within the industry. Some sysadmins are responsible for a wide swath of devices, from desktops, to servers, to printers, to air conditioning units. So, sometimes when you tell another IT professional that you’re a sysadmin,…
How to Validate Security by Scanning All The Things
Note: This article was originally published on Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin blog, https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin In parts one and two of this series, I walked you through hardening your system by identifying unneeded services, then segmenting and firewalling. Now that you’re all locked down, let’s talk about how we might validate that all of that hard work…
Defense in Depth
Note: This was originally posted on Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin blog. https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin This is the next step in my series on hardening and network security. Please check out the previous article on Lowering your Attack Surface by Disabling Unnecessary Services. Flat Networks There was a time when all networks were flat. A flat network is…
How to Lower Your Attack Surface
Note: This was originally posted on Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin blog. https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin Linux systems are complicated things. Out of the box, every distribution includes a number of services meant to help you get things up and running. Some distributions enable less services by default, some enable more. The difference is in convenience. Some distributions are…
Geeking Outside The Office
This was originally written for Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin. Enjoy!Nate Sysadmins have plush easy desk jobs, right? We get to sit in a nice climate controlled office, and type away in our terminals, never really forced to exert ourselves. It might look that way, and as I write this during a heat wave here in…
The Day The RHV Manager Went Away…
This is an article I originally wrote for Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin. Nate Late on a tuesday afternoon, I had somewhere to be after work, that made driving all the way home and then back again a waste of time. So I was in my office late, killing some time, getting a little work done,…
Sysadmin Appreciation Day
This is an article I wrote for Red Hat’s Enable Sysadmin for Sysadmin Appreciation Day 2019. Enhoy!Nate Sysadmin appreciation day is coming, on July 26th you’ll have a chance to thank one of the least thanked people in your life, your local Sysadmin. In today’s connected world, it’s likely that you rely on a sysadmin…
Locking down sshd
SSH, or Secure SHell, is the way in which a modern linux system is managed. Most experienced sysadmins love the direct access and power they get from being able to securely connect to a shell on their systems with relative ease. SSH replaced Telnet somewhere in the 90’s as the remote access protocol of choice,…