I found this on redhat.com the other day….

It is now possible to limit yum to install security updates only. To do so, simply install the yum-security plugin and run the following command:

yum update –security

Hopefully this will allow fedora users to have the option of running a “stable” install

There are times where you cannot use WiFi, for example my workplace’s WLAN uses LEAP, which maemo doesn’t support. I found that setting up USB networking on my n800 was a bit of a pain since there isn’t a single document… if you check my del.icio.us feed you’ll see I bookmarked all I could find with a usbnet tag.

These are the steps I ran through to enable usb networking between my nokia n800 and my fedora 7 laptop.

I after installing Fedora7 I thought I’d take a look at the stats the project had gathered, I saw some centos devices, but couldn’t find a rpm.

I’ve had a go at building one, it mostly works (this is my nagios box), it’s a rebuild of the f7 source, I have to frig about with the spec file, so I’ve published my source rpm here, search for Nick in the .spec file, you’ll see my bodge.

The smolt rpms are in my yum repo, feel free to download the packages and have a go.

• smolt-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm
• smolt-firstboot-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm

I was doing some testing on my server the other day, and realised that http compression within apache (httpd) was not enabled by default. Further digging showed me that mod_defate was what I needed, and infact it was installed by default on my CentOS box.

How to enable mod_default on Centos: Create /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf with the following contents

I’ve taken to using CentOS on my servers, and fedora on my Laptop. New job, means new laptop, and to avoid fedora update hell, I thought I’d try CentOS on my laptop.

All seems good other than my wifi card not being detected, and for some reason googling for “centos 5 intel 3945” didn’t provide a working anserwer, actually I found the answer by googling for “supplementary disk centos 5” which finds this thread that says…

Install dag’s repo (this rpm), and then install dkms-ipw3945 (yum will pick up the dependancies)

yum install dkms-ipw3945

Next enable network manager…

Could that title get any longer !

Hopefully you get the point, sometimes you need different tools for different jobs, if you want a full development platform with SVN support I suggest you take a look at eclipse (with subclipse ) but what if you already have done the development and you just want to do a quick upload.

My phpbb_recent_topics plugin is hosted here, and when the nice guys at wordpress gave me an svn account, I just wanted a quick way to upload what I’ve done. Now I must stress this may not be the “proper” way to use svn (there’s a book for that) but it is enough to achieve what we want, a straight forward upload.

Whilst doing some routine maintenance, I noticed that I never published the rkhunter rpm I built, the software is officially supported at rootkit.nl but for ease I wanted a yum available rpm

There are somethings that you just never get round to, my nagios box was still running whitebox linux, and I’ve finally gotten round “upgrading” it to CentOS… yeah ok, upgrade is arguable, but you get my point.

First off a warning: Don’t do this ! All the documentation, for CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, any redhat linux all say, clean installs are the best way, and upgrades are not advised…. therefore I offer no support or warranty that this will work, in fact, I you advise you to read this post, but step away from your consoles !

Following a request I’ve rebuilt a later tripwire rpm (2.4.1.1); I think at this point it would be prudent to point out that the rpms found here are not maintained, and I do not offer any kind of support - you use them at your own risk - but you’re welcome to make requests !

tripwire-2.4.1.1-1.i386.rpm

My Yum repo has also been updated, config file here

If you look after a remote linux box, the chances are you use SSH, in order to connect to it you may even have to leave PORT 22 open to the whole Internet !

There are some basic security steps that you can do to protect SSH, such as block the root user from logging in, and force users to use STRONG authentication.