z900collector

I was reviewing this site and decided it was time for an update!

It was time for an update, so the site has a new theme….. still focused on various fields I work in or follow…. enjoy.

I’ve written a new post on how to boot using EFI from a DHCP server and deploying ISO images. in the example I use Oracle Linux 8.9 which is RHEL 8.9 with a few extra branding files.

In my quest to streamline my SaltStack deployments which I wrote about here (Managing top.sls and SLS files in SaltStack) and make it super simple to craft and deploy SaltStack in new builds I decided to revisit Pillars for holding CRON data.

NOTE: The environment is “zsh” in a Dell PowerStore Appliance.

Over the years I have written a few blog posts on using SaltStack to do stuff with a Mysql DB.

One thing I have learned with SaltStack is that its easy to manage the configuration of VM’s regardless of the scale of the Infrastructure.

In the year 2038… From the Linux Programming manual…. 10.1 Calendar TimeRegardless of geographic location, UNIX systems represent time internally as ameasure of seconds since the Epoch; that is, since midnight on the morning of1 January 1970, Universal Co…

Log files are usually cleaned up based on age, however I was asked to cleanup a special log directory when the file system hit 79G and then remove the oldest files to keep it just under 79G (the file system was 100G).

Well after many years someone has found an exploit in saltstack!

Normally, CENTOS does its job as an OS very well and response times on most CENTOS 7 systems is pretty good given the right resources, so this issue doesn’t raise it’s head often but when it does it can be a pain to locate.

August 2020 – This Article is still valid in Laravel 7 🙂 In a large scale Laravel application the number of routes can grow substantially, and while there are numerous composer packages to simplify the syntax and management of routes, I’ve found that one…

Since CENTOS 7 came out I’ve noticed some containers take forever to return a password prompt when you ssh into them.

I’ve written a reasonable amount of articles on Laravel, it’s now my favourite development environment.

Introduction Over the last year I’ve been developing a new shopping cart using Laravel.

Every month I spend a small portion of time repairing an exploited website.

Back when I wrote this I used Saltstack everyday to manage a large Cloud Infrastructure Platform.

Saltstack still remains my daily system administration tool and the range of uses keeps growing!

In previous articles on Reverse Engineering PHP security exploits I’ve explored malicious PHP and even associated Javascript code by reverse engineering the files left behind.

Prior to CENTOS 7, most Linux distributions used flat text files to store logging information of both user and system processes.

Update April 2018 – The Laravel “Mailable” interface is now the preferred way to mail off templated eMail – Article coming shortly!

I’m a big fan of Message Queueing and in particular RabbitMQ.

I’ve noticed since Centos 7 came out there has been a significantly growth in the number of core files appearing on machines I look after.

Recently I needed to make a copy of a failing 255G Samsung 850PRO SSD that was in a RAID 1 mirror (where the second SSD had already failed) to a new quicker Intel SSD, there were two issues that were critical.

Well the new year has started and before the end of the first week, we already have discovered our first PHP exploit in our WordPress hosting environment!

Display the size of all tables in a MySQL Database NOTE: This no longer works in MaraiDB 10.9 Below is a simple (and handy) SQL that returns the size of each table in a mySQL database: You would typically use this to see if a table containing logging data…

Converting a Linux CENTOS server with 2 or more Ethernet interfaces to an LACP bonded network link couldn’t be simpler.

Below is a handy script to capture and log access to a specific port on a server, the reason for its existence was the need to phase out an old service but we were not too sure as to what still connected to it.

There are stacks of books on the Arduino these days and as time goes by they become more and more advanced with host of sophisticated projects.

As an avid motorcyclist Ive spent years going to charity rides, rallies and the like… now I’m raising money for prostate cancer.