Every once in a while I get asked why I don’t have an out-of-office message for my email or voice mail. Truth is, I’ll often monitor my email even when I’m out, though I often practice good operations discipline by not responding. Just as intermittent problems with computer systems are hard to deal with, a […]

I’ve found that things that are free of charge are often not a good deal. TANSTAAFL, or “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” You’re always paying in some way. Maybe the piece of hardware is marked up more to cover the development cost of the “free” software that comes with it. Perhaps […]

I was setting up VMware vRealize Automation’s Active Directory connections the other day and I needed the public SSL certificate for the AD DCs to authenticate correctly. You can use OpenSSL to get that information. I used a Linux shell but this should be do-able from a Mac or with OpenSSL installed on Windows, too. […]

I just got a new iPhone Xs Max. I had an iPhone 6s which I liked a lot, but it’s been a few years and with more travel I thought I’d enjoy having a better device with me. There are a few things that bit me in the duff. Some two-factor authentication (2FA) apps like […]

by George Whittaker Introduction Linux system administration encompasses managing the software and hardware of Linux systems, which can be complex, especially for those new to Linux or managing multiple systems. Fortunately, Webmin, a web-based interface, simplifies many of the routine tasks involved in maintaining a healthy Linux system. This article explores how Webmin can be […]

by Bryan Lunduke What is DevOps? How does it relate to other ideas and methodologies within software development? Linux Journal Deputy Editor and longtime software developer, Bryan Lunduke isn't entirely sure, so he asks some experts to help him better understand the DevOps phenomenon. The word DevOps confuses me. I'm not even sure confuses me […]

by Kyle Rankin Take a tour through the best infrastructure I ever built with stops in architecture, disaster recovery, configuration management, orchestration and security. Working at a startup has many pros and cons, but one of the main benefits over a traditional established company is that a startup often gives you an opportunity to build […]

by Andy Carlson How to provide robust monitoring to low-end systems. When running a critical system, it's necessary to know what resources the system is consuming, to be alerted when resource utilization reaches a specific level and to trend long-term performance. Zabbix and Nagios are two large-scale solutions that monitor, alert and trend system performance, […]

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 (mountpoint-s3) now allows you to mount an S3 bucket in AWS at EC2 instance boot time via fstab. However, it remains non-POSIX compliant, so standard filesystem operations like deleting or renaming files still do not work. In contrast, the open-source alternative s3fs-fuse offers substantial POSIX support but comes with its own […]

Enabling Administrator protection in Windows 11 significantly improves security by addressing critical User Account Control (UAC) weaknesses. Unlike UAC’s split-token model, where elevated processes share the user’s session and can be exploited by malware, Administrator Protection creates a separate, system-managed administrator account (SMAA) that generates isolated, just-in-time admin tokens for each task, which are destroyed […]

Creating an AI agent in Amazon Bedrock involves a relatively complex process. The example in this post has been simplified for clarity. Once you have your first Agent setup working, exploring all the features that AI agents in AWS offer becomes much easier. The Bedrock Agent I discuss uses a Lambda function, which can be […]

Entering a PIN is one of the authentication methods available through Microsoft’s Windows Hello. It offers a simplified sign-in experience, especially for devices that lack biometric capabilities. This option must be explicitly enabled in domain-joined environments or those using Entra ID. However, its functionality is significantly restricted on virtual machines hosted on Hyper-V. Source