Thursday, 18 September 2014

XFS on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

This is just a quick post. I've used the XFS filesystem on many, many Linux hosts for a great many years now. I've used it on CentOS6 since that OS was first released, and XFS is now the default filesystem for RHEL7. So, I went to make a new XFS filesystem on a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 system in the past week, I more than a little bit surprised...

Monday, 15 September 2014

CentOS 6 to CentOS 7: Upgrade of my Desktop

Deciding that the best way to learn a system is to use it, I recently decided to move my primary Desktop system at work from CentOS6 to CentOS7. This is the story of that upgrade. Running the Upgrade Tool So, after some planning and system prep work, I ran the CentOS upgrade tool. This caused me many false starts - including the fact that my...

Gnome 3 on CentOS 7 - How I Made It Lovely and Usable

I generally really liked Gnome2 in RHEL6 - it was stable and worked well, and it's shortcomings had been largely addressed over the years. I promised I wouldn't fall prey to everyone else's griping about GNOME3 - but it's quite hard not to. For example, I have to use the command line to configure many of the GUI settings - Seriously?? I won't...

Friday, 5 September 2014

Importing a SSL Wildcard Certificate from an Apache Webserver onto a Cisco ASA 5500

I recently needed to use the same wildcard certificate on both a Linux Apache host (Apache 2.2, RHEL6) and a Cisco ASA (5505), and this is how I did it. This blog post starts _after_ I have the certificate generated, signed, installed, working & tested on the Apache host (which was just a standard CSR + install process, documented in thousands...

Monday, 11 August 2014

FirewallD: Adding Services and Direct Rules

This post will expand somewhat upon the firewall rules in my RHEL7-install blogpost. I'm trying to make an IPsec connection between two machines (CentOS6 & CentOS7) - I'll detail the IPsec in another post, but this covers adding the FirewallD rules on the CentOS7 box. I did have quite a few of these commands in my RHEL7 post, but Blogger somehow...

Friday, 11 July 2014

Red Hat Enterprise 7: This Train Has Now Arrived on Multiple Platforms, All Change

I am just preparing my first Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 server - installed on Hyper-V, no less. Here is a collection of notes I have made along the way. Guest VM on Hyper-V (Server 2012 R2) I've used a Generation 2  VM for my RHEL7 guest - this is supposedly fully supported by both Microsoft and Red Hat, although fairly poorly documented by...

Thursday, 26 June 2014

Powershell: OS Detection

What OS am I executing on? What bitness? Some Handy Functions to Use Sometimes, it's important to know what OS you are running on, and/or how many bits that OS has. Here are some useful functions which can be reused in other Powershell scripts (a future post may include putting such things into a Powershell Module). Please note that this hasn't been...