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Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.

You could do this configuration easily with rsyslog or syslog-ng to send/receive the logs and logrotate to rotate the files locally on your machines, today I want to show you some open source programs that can receive the logs, store them on filesystem or database and analyse them presenting the results via Web dashboards.

These are large applications most suited for big company, or in general to everyone that want to keep and manage a lot of data they are: Apache Flume, Logstash, Greylog2 and Scribe

If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi. This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the otuput through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.

If you’re a real gamer you know just how terrifying Windows 8 can be. With the changes they’ve made there just might not be any sort of viable way for real gamers to get the kind of experience they want. Expect seriously inconvenient DRM implementations and major difficulties for independent developers because of the proprietary (and profitable) app store built in to Windows 8. Independent developers are going to have no choice but to make the transition, meaning quality free games will disappear, too.

In the past I’ve posted an article regarding the basic usage of grep, one of the commands that I use daily at work to search a text within multiple files, or a text string in the list of running process of a Linux server, but I’ve forgot to show you a small and useful option : How to colour the output that you get from grep to highlight the text you were searching for in a long line. This is a small option of this powerful command but can save your eyes when searching for a particular property of a Java process that is 4 or 5 lines long.

In the past I’ve published some info to enhance the security of your ssh server such as 3 easy steps to strengthen your ssh server or how to use SSH for more secure browsing in public networks, today we’ll take a look at the PAM modules of GNU/Linux and in particular the module ssh and at some options that we can activate to strengthen our ssh server.

Today I was in need to install 1 single package from the unstable release of Debian in a server installed with the stable release, so what’s the best way to get this done? For this example I’ll use the package drush because there are a lot of differences in the versions between the different release of Debian.

Open source Learning Management Systems have become extremely popular in recent years, but what does open source mean? Open Source technology is technology where the source code is “open”, that is, the code is available to the public and free to be modified. Improvements can be made by developers and it can be spread or sold to the wider community. So, why should an organization choose an open source Learning Management System as opposed to a homegrown or proprietary Learning Management System?

Today I propose to you 7 nice games about driving, they are all open source and freely downloadable. I’m not a great fan of this genre but I’ve played some of them and they have great graphics, and you’ll not miss what you can find on a Windows Computer. They are: Vdrift, TORCS, Speed Dreams, Supertuxkart , Racer, Trigger Rally and Stunt Rally

Many educators might have been hesitant in the past regarding embracing open source software. But not any more as the number that has taken to open source software (OSS) has increased significantly over the years. As more teachers as well as institutions are now engaging with organizations such as Open Source Schools, SchoolForge among others. Consequently, these educators have begun to realize the potential inherent in OSS that can help transform education in many ways.

In a previous post we’ve seen how to Enable automatic security update in Debian/Ubuntu, I use it on my Debian VPS and I must say that I’ve forgot to be worried about security updates thanks to this, but perhaps you have a Red Hat 6 or Centos 6 and you want to sleep well as well ?

There is no problem, today we’ll see how to achieve the same result on a Centos 6 machine.

Steam is a great source for any gamer. It is a place that will allow you to try out and enjoy many of the more popular video games that are available on the market today. Steam Greenlight will allow you to vote on games that you would like to see come available. It is a great system for gamers, so they do not have to drop $50 to purchase every game off the shelf. They can simply join Steam and enjoy the most popular ones at a reduced price. Steam is not only a place to acquire games to play it is also a place where you can talk with other gamers and possibly get information on cheat codes or creative ways to pass a particularly difficult level. It is convenient and rather popular.

Today I am pleased to publish an interview with Gabriele, leader of the project SalentOS, as well as owner of the interesting blog gmstyle.org , in the past we exchanged emails and articles and today I want to write a little more information about him and his project.

At the base of these articles there is a simple fact: a simple rm of a file or deleting it via any file manager is not enough to really remove it from your hard disk.

If you really want to delete files from a computer you have to use more sophisticated commands and in this article we'll take a look at the package secure-delete

Proxmox Ve is an Open Source project developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Austria under the auspices of the Internet foundation of Austria (IPA) and it’s released under the GNU General public license 3. It is a solution based on Debian 6 Squeeze at 64 bit, which duly “customized”, allows to create a virtualization environment of type “bare metal” based on OpenVZ and KVM technologies.

I just discovered this great opportunity thanks to a collegue of mine, and i want to share this information with all of you. Just for 24 hours it’s possibile to get Crossover Linux and 1 year of support for free.

Like many others, I’ve been patiently awaiting the arrival of my Raspberry Pi order. For now, I have lots of time to figure out what to do with it once it arrives. I have a few projects I’d like to do, but one in particular stands out – Advanced Alarm Clock. I certainly can’t take credit for the initial idea of making an advanced alarm clock out of a Raspberry Pi computer, but I do look forward to making one just how I want it to be.

The Open GTS (Open GPS Tracking System) Project is an open source project developing the Open GTS application, focusing on a GPS application specifically built for managing fleets of vehicles for small businesses. Fleet vehicles have different requirements for GPS applications than individual vehicles. For instance, the dispatch manager’s ability to keep track of each vehicle’s location through the work day is just as important as the driver’s ability to find their way around with accurate real time mapping and directions.

In a former article I’ve talked about the commands cron and crontab that are the standard way to schedule recurring things on a Gnu/Linux system.

But sometimes you need to do one thing at a specific date and time for just one time, and for these tasks the best option is to use at, another way to use at is to run a command later when the computer won’t be busy.

Or another reason could be that you want to run a command that requires a lot of time to end and you have to disconnect from that server, at could be used in this situation, but for these task i suggest to take a look at the articles on how to run commands on background and the utility screen

Small news for my readers, one of the game included in one of my article the Top 10 games for Linux in 2012 , is available until the 21 of October in a Indie Bundle, that as usual means that you can get it, and something more, with a very low budget.

To be honest of the 5 games available in this bundle just 2 are ported on Linux, but one of them is Oil Rush that, in my opinion, is worth alone the price of the whole bundle.

There’s a new GNU/Linux distro designed to help you in every aspect of your mobile forensics, mobile malware analysis, reverse engineering and security testing. It’s called Santoku Linux. Santoku is a general purpose kitchen knife which originated from Japan, meaning “three virtues” or “three uses”. This distribution is not from Japan, but the name was suggested by Thomas Cannon of viaForensics (who happens to be the project leader of Santoku Linux) because the distribution was crafted specifically for Mobile Forensics, Mobile Malware Analysis, and Mobile Security Testing. The current alpha release is based on a fork of the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) MobiSec Ubuntu distro thus making this alpha release an OWASP MobiSec Remix (released under GPL) with added tools from viaForensics and some of its contributors or supporters. This project or platform is sponsored and launched by viaForensics which is a known and very innovative digital forensics and security firm that focuses or specializes on computer and mobile forensics, mobile application security, enterprise security, information security and penetration testing, and forensics training.