Below is a quick way to disable SSL v3 for apache configurations. Lets start off by creating a new file in our /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory. You can name this file whatever you’d like. In this example we are using a Plesk on a RHEL based system. 1. Create file touch /etc/httpd/conf.d/zz050-psa-disable-weak-ssl-ciphers.conf 2. Add following contents to file SSLHonorCipherOrder on SSLProtocol ALL -SSLv2 -SSLv3 SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!LOW:!SSLv2:!EXP:+HIGH:+MEDIUM 3. Finally restart services service httpd restart If you are using Plesk, also […]

Here I will go over how to setup Logstash, Kibana, Redis, and Elasticsearch in an EC2 environment behind a public Load Balancer. The setup I’ll be doing will have: 1) One server for Redis to act as the broker/buffer to receive logs. 2) One server using Logstash receive logs from Redis and parse/index them over to Elasticsearch. 3) One server for Elasticsearch to receive logs and Kibana to view them in a browser. 4) One server to […]

In order to enable ProxyPass within plesk you will have to follow the following few steps. 1. Create/Edit the vhosts.conf file within the conf directory under domain root. /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN.TLD/conf/vhost.conf Add the following line ProxyPass / http://NEWDOMAIN.TLD/ 2. Next you’ll need to reconfigure the domain using one of the plesk tools. For Plesk version 10 and later use the following /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpdmng –reconfigure-domain DOMAIN.TLD 3. Lastly, you’ll need to restart or reload the httpd service. service httpd reload or […]

So you’ve created an Instance Store backed AMI and now you’d like to change it into an EBS backed AMI. I spent days looking trying to do this and pieced together several tutorials on how to accomplish this and came up with a simple tutorial. What you will need: Linux terminal AWS command line tools, secret key, and private key (In my previous post I covered on how to set it up here is the link: Your […]

This page is currently under development. I will be updating each section by supplying a link to examples and how to do each of the following points. Understand and Use Essential Tools Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax Use input-output redirection (>, >>, |, 2>, etc.) Use grep and regular expressions to analyze text Access remote systems using ssh and VNC Log in and switch users in multi-user runlevels Archive, compress, unpack and […]

In order to start, stop, or even check the status of any service you would use the utility service.

In order to stop or start virtual machines you can use either the virsh command or the virt-manager utility.

You can access a virtual machines console in a variety of ways. You could use either virsh, virt-manager, virt-viewer, or even ssh.

Logs are a good way to pin point issues or security breaches. You can configure what is logged by editing the /etc/rsyslog.conf file. The priority of the message will determine which file the logged text is going to be written to. There are 9 priorities that you should be familiar with. The priorities are none, debug, info, notice, warn, err, crit, alert, emerg where debug is the lowest priority and emerg is the highest.

Identifying problems on a system is very important and can save headaches for the future. You can use utilities such as ps, top, kill, and renice to manage and monitor processes on your Linux system.