Hello there, Occasionally some of our managed services work has us dealing directly with other cloud providers such as Amazon. One of our clients set a requirement to migrate over 5,000 domain’s to Amazon’s Route53 DNS service. There was little doubt that this could be automated, but since we have never done this massive of […]

Hello! MySQL replication has been known to easily break, as a result of a large multitude of potential causes. Sometimes the replication can even break if an erroneous query is executed on the master server. With all the potential issues that may break replication, we thought it prudent to write an automated check script that […]

Greetings, I thought I’d share a quick script in the scope of backing up GIT repositories for the purposes of encrypted and compressed off-site backups. Unfortunately git does not have an equivalent of svnadmin dump or export, which can conveniently be piped to stdout. What the above scenario would do is shorten the amount of […]

Greetings, It has been a while since we posted any useful tidbits for you , so we have decided to share one of our quick & dirty centralized backup scripts. The script relies on ssh key based authentication, described here on this blog. It essentially parses a configuration file where each variable is separated by […]

I am starting a series of blog posts that detail security related strategies, penetration testing and best practice methodologies. To start our series, I am going to delve into the world of SQL injection techniques and a general overview for those who are looking to learn a little more about this method of injection. There […]

In yet another post in our automation series, we will share a bash script that automates the deployment of debian based load balancers (specifically with LVS / Linux Virtual Server project). Even though the environments and systems you deploy may start to get more complicated such as with load balancers, there will always be a […]

Automation is as necessary as any other aspect of systems administration in any critical or production environment where growth and scalability are moving at a significant pace. Growth in any organization is obviously a good thing. In the systems administrator’s perspective, however, growth can mean more time spent deploying systems and less time spent focusing […]

With all the patch management solutions, local repositories and other options, it is rarely necessary to manually scan all servers on your network to build a “report” of the patch levels in your environment. Sometimes it is, however. For instance, if you are brought into an environment that has not been properly managed and require […]

Through our research and implementation of many Xen environments, it has become necessary to develop a reliable and secure method for backing up our Xen instances that are mounted on Logical Volumes (LVM).

With the advent of cloud computing, there have been several advances as far as commercial cloud offerings, most notably Amazon’s EC2 computing platform as well as their S3 Storage platform. Backing up to Amazon S3 has become a popular alternative to achieving true offsite backup capabilities for many organizations. The fast data transfer speeds as […]