Archive for 'Rex Consulting Tech Tips'

Privileged account access is a sensitive thing today, especially with all the compliance and regulations requirements built into most corporate information systems. Even without any regulation, most good UNIX and application operations people will want to know WHO did WHAT?

In the old days (pre-sudo), there was just “su” which was used to achieve the ability to run a command as another user, typically but not always root. The “su” was logged but it still could result in a lack …

Rex Consulting, Inc. | 3 weeks ago →

TLS is Transport Layer Security, the public version of the SSL protocol originally developed by Netscape. It’s used today to secure many client server connections over TCP/IP networks, including web (HTTP), email (SMTP), directory (LDAP) connections as well as many more types of traffic. It’s fairly easy to set up and maintain. You have to be concerned with and schedule certificate replacements and deployments, but that can be easily accomplished with a solid procedure that can be dovetailed into the …

Rex Consulting, Inc. | Last month →

A good monitoring rig and alerting system can significantly reduce the amount of work that needs to be done to operate a client server– or cloud– application system. Without a good monitoring system, administrators must rely on hit or miss spot-checking of logs and available metrics or instrumentation. Without good monitoring, there is no way to be sure that the system is healthy. It is true that a good administrator should and will continue to spot check logs and other …

Rex Consulting, Inc. | 2 months ago →

If you use LDAP simple authentication, you should take care to hide the LDAP password from the command line history. A lot of UNIX shells environments are configured to save the command line history. Of course this is a very useful function, on several levels, but it can also be a system security hazard as well, if we don’t pay attention to how we use it.

In an environment like most modern identity management systems, which often use LDAP servers …

Rex Consulting, Inc. | 2 months ago →