How To Block MSN & P2P on Linux (Using Shorewall)

October 23rd, 2007 Shorewall is an excellent free linux firewall which provides unparalleled level of fine grained control. It not only acts as a firewall and Gateway, it also supports DMZ, IP Masquerading (NAT & SNAT), Proxy ARP and more.

November 23rd, 2007 I learned it the hard way. Our gateway machine with firewall (shorewall) has multiple ADSL connections configured with load balancing for more bandwidth and transparent fail-over.

September 7th, 2007 I am wading through tons of material to improve my knowledge of Linux networking in general and more specifically to configure our firewalls properly and routing for multiple uplink providers with traffic shaping and failover. My earlier attempt to shortcut with eBox failed so this time I am going all the way.

February 18th, 2007 The basic idea of RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is to combine multiple small, independent disk drives into an array of disk drives which yields performance and recoverability exceeding that of a Single Large Expensive Drive (SLED). Redundancy is also provided (unless RAID 0) which allows easy and often automatic recovery from hard disk crash.

March 12th, 2008 I just received a mysterious call from Microsoft inquiring about our Windows usage! I was surprised to say the least. Why would a 100% Linux based company get a call from Microsoft? Read on for the juicy details.

July 12th, 2006 Take a look at your log file (/var/log/secure for Fedora Core 4) and you will discover numerous automated ssh hacking attempts using dictionary attack. So now you have identified the offending addresses.

April 16th, 2006 The most annoying thing about web these days is the prevalence of Macromedia Flash based eye candies and advertisement. Not only they are an irritating visual distraction (in most cases), they also consume way too much CPU.

April 17th, 2006 I found a super-simple way to block access to external email providers like GMail or HotMail or Yahoo Mail in firewall. The process while trivial to configure has a caveat.

January 6th, 2007 Programatically using ICMP Ping is a great way to establish that a server is up and running. Previously you couldn't do ICMP ping (what ping command does in Linux/Unix & Windows) in java without using JNI or exec calls.

June 24th, 2008 Leased Lines historically have been used as reliable, resilient internet and site-to-site data connections. The main benefits have been security, reliability, SLAs, private network and flexible speeds.

December 11th, 2007 We are looking for a full-time Linux system administrator to manage our dedicated servers and our internal servers, computers and network. He will also have to manage the MySQL server and other servers in-house.

April 5th, 2006 In an interesting press release IBM announced today that Olympus America Inc., a precision company that designs and delivers solutions in healthcare and consumer electronics worldwide, has increased the performance of its Web services three times by supplementing its current environment with Linux on IBM's "all-in-one" System i business computing solution. I am not surprised.

August 26th, 2008 Every one in my company knows about pkill, an obscure Linux command because we use Firefox (we are 100% Linux based) as the default browser. What is the relation, you ask? The answer is simple.

September 21st, 2008 CodeWeaver's released a port of Google's Chrome browser (review) for Linux. CrossOver Chromium is a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser.

May 12th, 2007 Mantis is popular php based defect tracking application which works on top of RDBMS like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Recently I ported our Windows based Mantis installation to Linux.