All Episodes

Listing all 76 episodes

CLI Monday: head, tail, and wc

Episode #26 - 2014-07-07 - 4 min

In this episode, I wanted to introduce a new episode type called CLI Monday. The idea being, we will review useful command line utilities every Monday. Today, we are going to review the head, tail, and wc commands.

Bits Sysadmins Should Know

Episode #25 - 2014-05-27 - 10 min

The following is a crash course on what I think goes into the making of a well rounded Linux Sysadmin. This episode is a semi-organized brain dump of bits I have learned throughout my career, which will be used as a type of guide, or road map, for future episodes on this site.

Introduction to Containers on Linux using LXC

Episode #24 - 2014-04-30 - 15 min

In this episode, I wanted to give you an Introduction to Containers on Linux using LXC. We will look at what Containers are as a concept, why they are useful, and then move onto a live demo of what a Container looks like on a real system using LXC.

Root Privileges and Automated Tasks

Episode #23 - 2014-04-27 - 7 min

In this episode, we will discuss giving automated tasks narrow root privileges via the sudo command using the nopasswd option.

Common Archive and Compression Formats

Episode #22 - 2014-04-24 - 11 min

In this episode, I wanted to talk about common archive and compression formats that you are likely to encounter on Linux machines. We will review the differences between archive and compression formats and then focus on how to create and extract these formats using various utilities.

Anatomy of a SQL Injection Attack leading to Code Execution

Episode #21 - 2014-01-02 - 15 min

In this episode, I am going to show you what a SQL injection attack is, along with how it works, and then we will look at several methods to prevent them. We will also look at how a SQL injection attack can reach far beyond the database.

How to write an Incident Report / Postmortem

Episode #20 - 2013-11-19 - 5 min

In this episode, I wanted to look at how to write an Incident Report, also referred to as a Postmortem. Rather than give you something of my own creation, lets look at a Google Incident Report from early 2013, which I think serves as a great example.

Crash Course on Man Pages

Episode #19 - 2013-11-14 - 6 min

In this episode, I wanted to look at how we can use the man command to view manual pages for various commands, configuration files, and system libraries.

Managing Iptables with Puppet

Episode #18 - 2013-11-12 - 13 min

In this episode, I wanted to show you the Puppet Labs Firewall module. We are going to use what we learned in episode #8, about Vagrant and Puppet, and apply that to managing iptables firewall rules with Puppet.

Why you should use a Wiki

Episode #17 - 2013-11-07 - 13 min

In this episode, I wanted to talk about why you should be using a Wiki for keeping track of internal documents, policies and procedures, as well as other information about your infrastructure, then in the latter part of the episode, we will cover how to install MediaWiki on a CentOS 6.4 box.