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

Manually enroll SLES12 systems to Redhat IdM

RHEL and Ubuntu systems leverage the ipa-client software to easily enrolled them to a Redhat IdM system. Unfortunately SLES12 lacks the required packages. Nevertheless, SLES12 systems can be enrolled manually. This article is about how to achieve this. Why using IPA for SLES systems? Most organizations are not pure RHEL or pure SLES shops, the reality shows a heterogeneous mix of Linux distributions in corporate data centers. It makes sense to use the same authentication and authorization system to manage ….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

SUSE Manager based on Fedora Spacewalk

SUSE announced the availability of SUSE manager. Having a closer look to it, one recognizes it is based on Fedora Spacewalk. It is a clone of the Red Hat Satellite. A few weeks ago I was puzzled to see a post on the spacewalk-devel mailing list. SUSE was contributing some code. What the heck? Now it is clear, they are using Spacewalk as there source for its own product. Spacewalk is no longer just the upstream of RHN Satellite, but ….Read More

Epson scanners on Linux systems

I’ve got a Epson Perfection 1260 Photo scanner. Fedora like other distributions such as OpenSuse are recognizing the device since a long long time. The back end chosen for the device is plustek. Unfortunately when using the default configuration one experience very strange effects with colours. The left and the right 50% of the picture have a colored background, even when scanning a empty page. I had this problem with OpenSUSE since years and still got it with Fedora 1x. ….Read More

Bye bye Suse, welcome Fedora

Successfully migrated my workstation @home from OpenSuse to Fedora13 After using SuSE and later OpenSuse since 1994 it was time for a change. I was stuck at OpenSuse because of its excellent multimedia support trough 3rd party repostitories from packman. Last evening another update brought the system down once again. Time for change. Since a long time Fedora does not ship software any more which are problematic because of software patents, such as mp3, different video codecs etc. Since then ….Read More

Rumors about Novell and Suse Linux

There have been a lot of rumors that Novell will be sold. Latest rumors are that the Linux parts of Novell (former SuSE) will be split off and sold separately. Since that got public, there are even more rumors: Which company will buy the Linux part of Novell? Red Hat: Very unlikely, since the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in the EU and USA will most likely disagree because RHEL and SLES are already some kind of “duopoly”. Microsoft: No way ….Read More