Some time ago, the NSA released an excellent guide how to harden RHEL5 systems. Despite of being written for RHEL5, it partially also applies to RHEL6 and newer versions of Fedora. It is also worth looking at it for users of non-RH breed distributions. To be mentioned: Its clearly focused on server systems, not desktops. Some of the topics are really basic stuff which is already in place as industries “best practices”, other methods are not that well known. Most ….Read More
Tag: RHEL
RHEL 4.9 released
Today, Red Hat released its “service pack” or “maintenance release” of RHEL4. According to Red Hats life cycle policy” it ends the production stage two. That means: In future only bugs with a high severity will be fixed. The “normal” life cycle of RHEL4 will end in approx. one year. This means that everyone using RHEL4 systems should think about a migration scenario to RHEL6. Unfortunately, Red Hat does not support OS upgrades, you need to install the systems from ….Read More
RHN Satellite 5.4 released
RHN Satellite 5.4 was released. It can be downloaded from http://rhn.redhat.com. Release Notes: See the release notes from Red Hat More to report soon…. Have fun!
Deploying RHEL as ESX guests – Kickstarting or using ESX templates?
Some time ago I asked my self the question if it is better to kickstart systems or working with ESX templates when deploying RHEL as ESX guests. I also had some discussions with friends working in the same industry. I tried it and came to the following conclusion: Kickstart the systems is the way to go. Pros: Kickstarted Systems are already up-to-date after installation. Proper SSH host keys. Using ESX templates ends up in having identical SSH host keys, from ….Read More
What is possibly going into RHEL6 GA and what is not
As I wrote different times before, RHEL6 is going to have a Kernel based on upstreams 2.6.32 Kernel. Meanwhile Linus Torvalds and his fellows released 2.6.34. Since then – from a System Engineers Point of view – there have some “minor” changes which are affecting the daily work in enterprise environments. I think that Red Hat is aware that RHEL6 is one of its most important releases made so far. RHEL6 Beta-Testers have acknowledged that this is one of the ….Read More
IUS Community RPMs for Red Hats RHEL
I was criticizing that software in RHEL is too outdated for web servers quite soon after release, see my blog post http://blog.delouw.ch/2010/05/02/rhel6-as-a-web-server/. While this is true for a system fully supported by Red Hat, I learned an alternative from a comment on the post. This alternative is the so called IUS community repository. About the IUS Community Project The project was launched in September 2009. In spite of being a young project, it has a history. At Rackspace, a large ….Read More
Spacewalk 1.0 released
Spacewalk 1.0 has been released Spacewalk is the upstream project for Red Hat’s RHN Satellite software, one of the best systems management software available for Linux Systems. In the past few weeks one could see a lot of git commits on the source repository of spacewalk. There is no changelog available yet. The road map mentioned compatibility with Apache Tomcat 6.0.x to be able to install spacewalk on Fedora12 and RHEL6. There should have also been several enhancements in the ….Read More
Writing trigger scripts for cobbler does not work at the moment
At the moment, shell scripts as triggers wont work with cobbler. This is due to a bug. Unfortunately the developers wont fix it in the next few weeks or even months. Triggers are a very welcome and powerful method to automate things before, during after installation of a system. At the moment it only works with python scripts. Since not every sysadmin knows python, but everyone knows to write bash scripts, this is a major drawback. Cobbler is included in ….Read More