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I recently got the chance to read and work through many of the tutorials in the book The Artist’s Guide to GIMP, 2nd Edition: creative techniques for photographers written by Michael J. Hammel. Having only a sloppy, self-taught understanding of GIMP going into this I wanted to accomplish two things. Learn the fundamentals and equip myself with a stack of GIMP techniques I will actually use day to day.

Configure SNMP Version 3 to securely access your CentOS server using encryption. This article shows how to quickly set up SNMP versions 1,2 and 3 and then will show you have to make it secure.

An object in Nagios is a unit of information, such as a host, service, contact, group, timeperiod, etc. Since these units or objects represent text files, they can inherit properties from other units or objects.

GIT is the source control tool, a distributed version control system (dvcs) which is written in C. This provides a history of the files that are maintained by it. In distributed version control each user has a complete copy of the code so there is no central code repository. In this scenario an administrator makes changes, adds them to the index (called staging) and then adds them to the repository (called commit). Git will take this information and maintain a version history that users can track. This is all performed locally but could be synchronized with a remote repository.

Recently we have worked with a small company who was trying to determine the best tool to monitor their network. They had heard of Nagios and wanted to explore that option first. They also were most interested in an Open Source option as they did not want to have renew licenses to lower their ongoing cost. In this type of evaluation, there are a lot of things to consider.

The Introduction says the goal of the book is “to help you improve your understanding of device drivers under FreeBSD”. OK, that is exactly what I wanted to do as I am currently working on several projects that use FreeBSD at deeper levels of understanding.

This coming Thursday marks the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin. Many users will download Ubuntu, try it and give up because of some small technical problem. Here is a list of tutorials and resources for Ubuntu beginners that I have found to be useful.

OSX is somewhat unique both in the fact that this is not a common server which is monitored and also your actually working with two operating systems, FreeBSD under the hood and OSX built on top. However, these examples could also be used for Linux distros with a few modifications. SNMP is selected for creating the checks because it is the easiest to deploy with minimal time on the servers to be monitored.

Bodhi Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution based on the LTS releases of Ubuntu. It makes use of the Enlightenment window manager and includes several unique features you won’t find on any other distro. I switched over to the recent release of Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 for two weeks and grew to love this little lightweight.

This article is a list of several frustrations that I experienced in the first 30 minutes, nothing major just small issues. Overall the desktop is nice to look at and works efficiently. Part of if is simply getting used to the changes.

This example uses CentOS 6 so one of the issues you will need to be aware of is SELinux. The great aspect of a slave server is that you can update your primary DNS server and it automatically update the slave.

VSFTPD using SSL can be a great way to protect your FTP transfers. This article will demonstrate how to set up the server, create the certificate, use FileZilla and modify the Ubuntu firewall.

The NRPE daemon provides a way for Nagios to monitor the internal aspects of a FreeBSD box. This article will take you through the steps for installing NRPE on FreeBSD.

Administrators can save a lot of needless writes to the disk by mounting partitions with noatime. Even if a file is read a write will occur to disk when you are using atime.

The Ubuntu Desktop, lacking the technology and innovation of the iPad, is loosing ground in the race for a common desktop. This article provides three reasons the iPad is dominating and why Apple is making money while Canonical is struggling.

MNTOS (Multi Nagios Tactical Overview System) provides a way to view a distributed network of Nagios servers. In the example all the Nagios servers are Nagios Core.

Cgroups are hierarchically designed just like processes and the child processes that inherit the attributes of the parent process. Since init is ultimately the parent of all processes, because it is the first process to start, this is structured like a tree. For processes this tree structure means that there is just a single hierarchy or tree.

Before you update your Nagios XI server be sure to create a good backup that could be used to recover if there are problems. This article provides you a script that you can use to backup Nagios XI before an upgrade and shows how to perform the upgrade of Nagios.

One of the most difficult tasks in writing for the new Linux user is trying to figure out how much to place on their plate. Linux from the command-line offers so much it is often presented in a way that overwhelms the user and they choke. This book does an excellent job at presenting the right amount of content without drowning the reader.

AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) is the Open Source version of Tripwire. AIDE takes a snapshot of every file on your server, records it and then will notify you of any changes. This tutorial will show you how to create a script that will automate this process and send you an email of the outcome.