Foreman, Katello and Red Hat Satellite 6 users have multiple possibilities to monitor infrastructure health. Beside the Foreman host, also managed systems and defined software content are worth monitoring. Foreman dashboard Foreman/Katello and Red Hat Satellite offer a dashboard with some widgets that can be used for …

Read More

GitLab can utilize LDAP to authenticate against a variety of directory services such as Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services or FreeIPA and Red Hat Identity Management. This post describes configuring and integrating into FreeIPA. By clicking Identity > User Groups > Add within the FreeIPA interface, an …

Read More

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) enables creating incremental backups of virtual machines. In comparison with conventional VM backups, guest hard drives are synchronized. Using CBT, the hypervisor detects changed blocks and the backup software will only store these blocks. Unfortunately these are some vSphere and backup …

Read More

Photon OS is minimalistic RPM-based Linux distribution which is focussed on running Docker containers. It was optimized for VMware platforms (Workstation, Fusion, vSphere, vCloud Air) - e.g. its Linux kernel offers a caching mechanism optimized for vSphere. Another characteristic is the customized package manager tdnf …

Read More

When creating RPM packages recently, I had the effect that package names on CentOS 7 were set incorrectly. For example, a package had the name pinkepank-0.6-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm but should have set pinkepank-0.6-1.el7.x86_64.rpm instead. As Enterprise Linux derivates (CentOS, Scientific Linux,...) offer binary …

Read More

Recently I found out that Red Hat Identity Management (IdM) and FreeIPA tend to forgot their global DNS configuration after some upgrades. In my case, the global DNS forwarder configuration was dropped forcing external lookups to fail: 1$ ipa dnsconfig-show 2--------------------------------- 3Global DNS configuration …

Read More

The last couple of days I have been working on a new project I want to introduce: IcingaBusylightAgent. It all began with a new telephony system in our office. Instead of using physical phones, my colleagues are now using softphones. In addition to this, a gadget called Busylight representing the instant messenger …

Read More

Wordpress updates, themes and plugins can be installed very comfortable in the backend - unfortunately it is still required to specify FTP or FTPS connection information. Depending on your personal preferences or security policy FTP is often not an option - e.g. when you're maintaining a central directory for SSH users …

Read More

During a fresh CentOS installation recently I had the problem that a system's network connection was not working reliably. Sometimes pings were possible, sometimes not. After it was possible to elimiate the firewall as commonly root cause, it turned out that the network connectivity was only working if the console is …

Read More

Grafana offers the possibility to authenticate users against LDAP - make it quite easy to integrate the tool into existing directory services. I'm using FreeIPA as directory and authentication service in my lab and had to adjust some settings to authenticate Grafana access. The first step is to alter the main …

Read More