Information Technology
I’m always looking for books that cover a topic from a different angle or a broader approach, this one is the perfect example, indeed, security-focused but through the magnifier lens or under the influence/culture of Agile.
Working for a Software Development company I found this book a good match for my DevOps/System Engineer role and I put it on my wish list. Six months ago I purchased another book, but guess what happened? Continue reading “Book Review: Agile Application Security”
I love Linux and I always considered myself an Open Source enthusiast. After reading “The Practice of System and Network Administration”, I decided to add this must-read book to my list.
The contents are well organised and good not only for beginners and junior system administrators but I think there are very interesting takeaways for more experienced professionals too. Continue reading “Book Review: UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 5th Edition”
There is no such thing as the myth of a “perfect” green-field deployment. But in real life most of the times there is a just room/resources (e.g. time and money) for patches of green on a big brown-field.
What I really mean.. is that we can’t always keep up with the pace of new technologies and just re-design things from ground up following new trends without understanding or maintaining the legacy design or more importantly meeting the business needs.
Starting from the network and I like to create a basic network diagram will outline at glance things that could potentially limit infrastructure growth or expose it to potential risk that we need to mitigate. Designing , re-designing things well or better is based on getting the requirements right and verify that desired targets are met. To speed up this discovery process we use tools to gather the information we need. Continue reading “Powershell: How to perform Ping Sweep and Reverse-Lookup on a private network”
Nagios is a very powerful open source tool for monitoring networks and infrastructures. The number of plugins available on Nagios Exchange and extensions make this tool essential to not just to be reactive but to create workflows and escalations if needed in a matter of minutes.
The installation and configuration of this tool under a major linux distributions is not difficult.
The default tool for monitoring a Windows network are SCCM/SCOM and OMS, but if your environment is a mixed environment I think personally that Nagios can be considered a safe bet!
NSClient++ is the agent needed for performing some interesting checks on windows and you can leverage your powershell scripting ability to perform custom checks on the environment. Continue reading “PowerShell, Nagios and NSClient++”