Rich Jerrido

Sometimes I need a webserver while doing troubleshooting, such as testing firewalls or proxy servers, and installing Apache or Nginx is a bit heavyweight for my tastes (or time). Optimally, I would want something that I can invoke easily, keep in the foreground, and CTRL-C when complete. Luckily, Python includes a simple webserver which gives [...]

As part of a recent restructuring of my home lab, I have started looking at incorporating some monitoring solutions. Currently, I am a big fan of Munin. But as of recently, I started playing around with Observium, and so far, I like it a lot. This document describes how to setup Observium on a RHEL6 [...]

Travelling fairly frequently has caused me to re-evaluate the way that I travel and my workflow. In the process, I’ve learned some new tools, as well as learning new tricks for existing tools that I have. Most of my toolkit is designed around security and backups, since while I am away from 127.0.0.1 ::1, data [...]

For years, I have been searching for a good monospaced font as my professional life revolves around being SSH’d into servers. Many other fonts (Droid Sans Mono, Red Hat’s Liberation, & Lucida Console) have all come close to being my monospaced font of choice, but somehow were quirky enough to not really fit well with [...]

Being the pirate digital pack-rat that I am, I am perpetually running out of storage capacity. My recent addition to the household has been (yet another) Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda to add to my primary storage array, which consists of 4 more 1.5TB Barracudas in a raid 5 array /dev/md0. On this raid array, I have [...]

One of the things I have struggled with for the longest is getting postfix and gmail working together. That is: I wanted to relay mail off my workstation to my gmail account. After googling a million how-to’s that involved setting up a CA and creating certificates for my postfix instance, I started thinking: When I [...]

One of the coolest things I love about *nix is the ability to customize your shell to be exactly the way you want. One of the first things I do on a new system is to copy over my .bashrc file so that I have all my customizations with me. From Wikipedia When Bash starts, [...]

What’s a *nix admin to do when they are work in a heterogenous environment? Make it like home. On my desk, I have two systems, my company issued and managed laptop, and my Debian Linux admin workstation. Its a pain to use my Windows laptop as it doesn’t have the usual amenities of a *nix, [...]

- To remove all the comments and blank lines from a file – /etc/httpd.conf for example. grep -v ‘^#’ /etc/httpd.conf | grep -v ‘^$’ – (Postfix) To extract the message ID’s of all messages going to the example.com domain: grep example.com /var/log/maillog | awk ‘{print $6}’ | cut -c -10 – Create an ISO from [...]