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

Using IPA to provide automount maps for NFSv4 home directories

Since the invention of NFSv4, automount NFS home directories is secure. Since the invention of IPA, its easier to set up and maintain. This article guides you trough the steps needed to set it up. The procedures have been tested on RHEL7.1 for the IPA servers, RHEL6.6 and 7.1 as clients but should work on Fedora and CentOS. Unfortunately it seems not to work (yet) for Debian Sid and Ununtu. [Update] Works in Ubuntu 14.04[/Update] Assumptions Your Domain is example.com ….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