My department has several linux computers and auditing the logs is very tiresome if they are all localized to each computer. While the vanilla syslog offers remote logging features it uses udp and thus many things can affect the chance of log messages reaching their destination. the message dropping problem is not as widespread in syslog-ng since it uses tcp to transmit log packets.

Compiling syslog-ng is required as the only syslog-ng binaries are licensed and require a contract to purchase. under rhel/centos the eventlog compilation goes as planed, but things start going wrong when auto configuring syslog-ng itself. it will complain. configure: error: Cannot find eventlog version >= 0.2: is pkg-config in path? this is a easy problem that can be fixed with running configure in the following way:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure –sysconfdir=/etc

this causes the syslog-ng.conf file to go to /etc/syslog-ng.conf and adhere to the layout choices of rhel/centos.

to get the init scripts working correctly copy the sample that comes with syslog-ng.

cp contrib/init.d.RedHat-7.3 /etc/init.d/syslog-ng

after that its time to configure syslog-ng on the loghost.

my syslog-ng.conf file looks something ...

linux server: leif

solaris client: sisu

export the shares on leif to sisu and then exportfs -r

add an entry in /etc/hosts.allow on leif

on sisu modify the file /etc/auto_master and add the line

/- auto_direct

in /etc/auto_direct add lines like

/home -rw leif:/home

reboot and celebrate

if that is working its now time to set up nis to get remote logins

first set up the domainname in /etc/defaultdomain and use the domainname tool to set it

Create a directory named /var/yp/binding/domain

3. If you want the NIS client to broadcast for a NIS server (note: there must be a NIS server on your subnet), start NIS with /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypstart. If you want to manually specify one or more NIS server(s) to use, run ypinit -c and then /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypstart. Note that each manually specified NIS server must have an entry in /etc/hosts.

4. Modify the name service switch file (/etc/nsswitch.conf) to use the NIS databases. You may want to copy /etc/nsswitch.nis over /etc/nsswitch.conf. Make sure to modify the “hosts:” line in /etc/nsswitch.conf if you want ...

when the sun tech installed the hard drive array he made one big 4TB partition. when i finally made my mind up about which size quota to give each user i realized that i needed to have a separate partition for the quotas. i used lvm to resize the partition and created an additional partition for the mail server to use. in /etc/fstab there needed to be an option to enable usrquota. after any changes are made to fstab the partitions need to be remounted. once this is done the quota files need to be generated. use the command “time /sbin/quotacheck -vguma” after the quota files have been set up, the quotas need to be set for all users

[root@babbage space1]# time /sbin/quotacheck -vguma quotacheck: Scanning /dev/mapper/volgroup1-homedirs [/space1] quotacheck: Cannot stat old user quota file: No such file or directory quotacheck: Old group file not found. Usage will not be substracted. done quotacheck: Checked 12 directories and 226 files quotacheck: Old file not found. quotacheck: Scanning /dev/mapper/volgroup1-www [/www] quotacheck: Cannot stat old user quota file: No such file or directory quotacheck: Old group file not found. Usage will not be substracted. done ...

I am responsible for imaging all the linux workstations this summer and i
was trying to make it more personal this time. Usually they are all
default installations where a lot of stuff doesn’t work the right way.
This time i want to put a lot of effort into it and do it right. One of
the small things i wanted was a boot theme like i saw at LSU. I choose
centOS because of the long term support it offered and the targeted use.
centOS uses a program called rhgb, Red Hat Graphical Boot, to display
the start up sequence on boot. I was able to easily change the images
and i was able to get my schools logo and seal on there but i would like
to have the colors match as well. Right now the background is the
centOS blue, which if i cant change, will become cardinal blue. I might
have to go to a student government association next week and ask them to
change the schools colors to more match this labs computers. As a
backup plan i am still working on changing the background color to red. I
have asked a couple of ...