HOWTO : Configure OpenSSH to Fetch Public Keys from OpenLDAP for Authentication on CentOS

Today we will configure our OpenLDAP server to store SSH public keys so that the OpenSSH daemon can fetch them and thus authenticate our users.

To do this, we first need two CentOS machines. This is easy to achieve via a KickStart. If you need help building a KickStart server, follow my previous blog post. Then we need a working OpenLDAP server. If you don't have one, then follow my previous blog posts to set one up.

HOWTO : CentOS 6 KickStart Server

This blog post will explain how to build a Kickstart server which is used to automatically perform untattended OS installation and configuration of both RedHat 6 and CentOS 6 machines.

Kickstart is basically a copy of the Solaris Jumpstart. If you manage IBM AIX machines, it's the equivalent of NIM. Or Ignite in the HP-UX world.

RCS and sudo log names

If you're tired of always seeing the root user in the RCS $Id$ tags, then follow this short and to the point blog post to switch this to the real author.

Map Apple Keyboard on Windows 7 and Restore Apple Function Keys

This is a short post just to redirect all Apple Keyboard users on Windows 7 machines to a great blog that explains how to get the full functions of the keyboard.

Check the Map Apple Keyboard on Windows 7 and Restore Apple Function Keys for more info.

CentOS yum(8) Error « No module named cElementTree » Fixed

I've been having problems with yum(8) on one of the CentOS 6 x86_64 machines. After looking at many different forums and bug reports, I now found the solution.

Oracle Solaris 10 Kerberized SSH Configuration

If you manage Oracle Solaris 10 machines, you might want to configure your servers to accept Kerberos principals via SSH. The SSH that comes with Solaris 10 does not understand the same configurations as the OpenSSH one does. And Solaris has a little quirk that Linux and BSD don't.

If you don't already have a Kerberos infrastrucutre in place, then the first thing to do is to set one up. Read my other article HOWTO : Kerberos KDC with OpenLDAP 2.4 Back-End and SASL GSSAPI Authentication on CentOS 6.2 to learn how to create a Kerberos realm.

MySQL Backup and Recovery

If your site manages it's data with MySQL, then you obviously need to make sure the data is safe. In this blog post, I will show how to create a daily backup automatically. I will also show a continuous data protection plan for MySQL databases. This blog post uses the previous backup server configured in my Secure Backup & Recovery with rsnapshot, rssh and OpenSSH article.

Oracle Data Pump

Today I'm going to show how I use Oracle Data Pump utilities. Starting with Oracle 10gR1, Oracle replaced both the export and import utilities by their new Data Pump counterpart : expdp and impdp respectively. The official documentation on these utilities is found in the Oracle Database Utilities10g Release 2 (10.2)

The steps outlined in this blog post are part of a database consolidation effort in which several databases from two different machines will be merged into a new Linux x86_64 server running RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.9 and Oracle RDBMS 10gR2.