Carla Schroder

Since Knoppix burst dramatically into the Linux scene there has been an explosion of Debian-based distributions. This is welcome news to us lonely souls who have long been preaching that Red Hat is not Linux. Linux covers a far wider spectrum, as a quick peek at DistroWatch demonstrates. You’ll find everything from tiny specialized Linuxes […]

In the beginning was tmsrtbt, “The most GNU/Linux on 1 floppy disk”- a complete bootable Linux-on-a-floppy disk. Perfect for rescue, testing, diagnostic, and maintenance missions of all kinds. But computers continued to grow in ability and complexity, and the tiny floppy disk could not hold everything a network admin needed, and thus was born the […]

Increasing security often means decreasing convenience. But when it comes to using a remote logging server, you get both security and convenience. All of your important logs are in one convenient-to-you location. If a host is compromised by a cracker, the logfiles are out of the varmint’s reach. In the event of a system failure […]

You hear it all the time: Monitor your logs. When there is a problem, check the logs. And it’s good advice, because system and application logs tell you anything you need to know, provided you actually look at them and understand what they are saying. Viewing logfiles is merely a question of volition; understanding what […]

Last week’s riveting installment covered the whys and wherefores of using iproute rather than the old standbys in the net-tools package  ifconfig, route, arp, and the rest of the gang, and how to use the ip command to read routing tables, ARP tables, assign additional IPs to network interface devices, and view network interface […]

If you’re an oldtyme network admin clinging possessively to your old Linux routing utilities in the net-tools package — ifconfig, route, arp, netstat, nameif, and so forth — it is perfectly OK if you continue to do so. They get the job done. However, they have some limitations that may matter to you. With net-tools […]

Last week we covered what Linux software RAID is good for and not good for, and hardware RAID vs. software RAID. In a nutshell it’s about getting good performance for just the cost of ordinary inexpensive drives and controllers, and either increasing uptimes or speeding up performance, or a bit of both. It is not […]

Two weeks ago we gave the high-level view of what windbind is for. Today we’ll walk through using winbind to provide a single sign-on for Linux servers and workstations joined to a Windows Active Directory domain. Join Samba Servers to Active Directory See Join Samba 3 to Your Active Directory Domain for how to do […]

A popular thing to do with Samba these days is to join a Samba 3 host to a Windows Active Directory domain. You may freely set up any number of Samba servers in a Windows network without joining them to the domain. The advantages of domain membership are central management and authentication, and single sign-on. […]

Instant messaging is a great business communications tool. For example, here at Enterprise Networking Planet the staff and writers all work in their pajamas at home, at far-flung points all over the globe. ENP’s crusty editor-with-a-heart-of-gold Perry White lives in a villa in the South of France. I send in my columns from a sailboat […]

Last week we provided an overview of why or why not to migrate a Windows NT4 domain controller to Samba. Today we’ll dig into how to do it, step-by-step. For larger LANs you can add a secondary Samba domain controller. Untroubled by expensive server and client access licenses, you can add as many as you […]

I confess, I’m an outlaw at heart. I like using packet sniffers like tcpdump because it satisfies my base snooping impulses. Packet-sniffing is wiretapping after all, only it’s applied to TCP/IP packets, not voice transmissions. Sure, they’re my packets on my systems, but still the idea is appealing. Even more appealing is knowing I have […]