Improve your bash shell working experience

This article shows some hints how to improve your bash shell working experience to reach higher productivity. Just simple shortcuts that are not so well known. Using the History The bash history is underestimated when it comes to usability. Here some nice stuff to do with the history. Search the history Every command is kept in the history. The simplest way to use the history is using the cursor-up/down keys. Most users are aware or [ctrl]-r. Usually you hit [ctrl]-r ….Read More

Audit your systems for security compliance with OpenSCAP

Introduction to (Open)SCAP SCAP stands for Security Content Automation Protocol. It is an open standard which defines methods for security policy compliance, vulnerability management and measurement etc. This article focuses on the operating system compliance part of SCAP. It comes originally from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide a way for US government agencies to audit its systems for regulatory compliance. OpenSCAP is a NIST validated open source implementation of SCAP. Why should I make ….Read More

Cross distribution system management with Spacewalk

In a perfect world, all systems in a data centre are running the same Linux operating system, a homogeneous system landscape. In real life things are working differently. Windows systems are out of focus in this post, lets concentrate on Linux systems. Most companies with a large Linux base are either RHEL shops or using SLES. A lot of RHEL users have some SLES systems running and so are SLES users running some RHEL systems. Some companies have additional systems ….Read More

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released

End of April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 was released. As always it is based on Debian’s Testing-Release. Canonical “stabilizes” the testing tree of Debian and adds its own look. This time, Ubuntu radically changed its look. From my point of view it looks ugly, very ugly. Strange colors, low contrasts in menus, orange icons in Nautilus… window buttons on the left side… At the end of the day an usability-horror. Under the hood Ubuntu is a very stable distribution with recent ….Read More

Ready to upstart?

It is time to replace the aged SysV init system with someting better At the time when  SysV init (pronounced “System five”) appeared, hardware configurations have been quite static, no hot plug and similar fancy stuff. SysV init is started after the kernel is loaded. The init process reads /etc/inittab and walks trough the runcontrol script and runlevels. This sequential walk-trough takes most of the time when booting a modern Unix system. Upstart follows another approach: Starting daemons and services ….Read More

302 Redirects behind SSL-terminating proxies

You have a web site all with SSL. There is a reverse proxy or load balancer that acts as SSL termination point. Behind that reverse proxy you have an Apache web server running plain http.

Your application uses 302 redirects to announce new URLs or whatever the reason is for doing so. Since the web server does not know that https URLs should be announced the response header looks like following:

Location http://www.example.com/your-fancy-url

The browser interprets that location header and send a request to this non-SSL URL instead of https:///www.example.com/your-fancy-url