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HOW TO : Playbook for creating an effective IT team

Tom Limoncelli put together a list of questions that are essentially a cheat-sheet to creating and running a very effective IT team. He called it the Limoncelli Test (as a tribute to the Joel Spolsky‘s Joel Test) and it can be found at http://everythingsysadmin.com/the-test.html.

The only additional thing I would add to the list is to have a roadmap for the function you provide and ensure it is updated quarterly. A lot of teams spend a lot of time on what they do now, but don’t focus on what they “can” do. This is similar to IT functions spending more than 70% – 80% of their budgets on maintenance rather than innovating.

August 22, 2011 by HOWTO Management Uncategorized 0

Overheard : Random comments about technology

Here are some interesting titbits from a executive summary event hosted by Redhat/Intel that I attended yesterday.

We decreased the execution times for our orders from 1.5 seconds to 5 milliseconds

This from an executive managing the technology organization for a large trading company. Imagine the geekiness in accomplishing this :).

For every 450 smartphones that get activated a server is added to support them

This from an Intel executive. So if there are 500000 android phones being activated every day.. that’s around 1111 servers being added just to serve the android fans :).

1 in 4 servers currently runs Linux

This from a Redhat executive. If anyone doubts that Linux is mainstream.. they are living under a rock 🙂

August 19, 2011 by Linux OverHeard Technology Uncategorized Web 0

HOW TO : Use grep to search for credit card numbers

I was looking for a quick way to search for credit card numbers in a file and ran across this excellent post by Adrian Rollett. I tweaked his suggestion a bit to show some additional data.

Original suggestion

[code] grep ‘\(^\|[^0-9]\)\{1\}\([345]\{1\}[0-9]\{3\}\|6011\)\{1\}[-]\?[0-9]\{4\}[-]\?\[0-9]\{2\}[-]\?[0-9]\{2\}-\?[0-9]\{1,4\}\($\|[^0-9]\)\{1\}’ FILE_TO_SEARCH [/code]

My modification

[code] grep ‘\([345]\{1\}[0-9]\{3\}\|6011\)\{1\}[ -]\?[0-9]\{4\}[ -]\?[0-9]\{2\}[-]\?[0-9]\{2\}[ -]\?[0-9]\{1,4\}’ –color -H -n FILE_TO_SEARCH [/code]

The modified command will show the name of the file the number was found and at which line. You can tweak it further using additional options for grep. A good reference guide can be found here.

August 17, 2011 by HOWTO Linux Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Export and import certificates using keytool

Keytool is a java utility to manage SSL key databases (stores). Here are a couple of options for using this tool

  • List the certificates in the keystore

[code]keytool -list -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE [/code]

  • Export a particular certificate from the keystore

[code]keytool -export -alias ALIAS_NAME_OF_CERT -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE [/code]

  • Import a certificate into the keystore

[code]keytool -import -alias ALIAS_NAME_YOU_WANT -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE -file NAME_OF_CERT_FILE_TO_IMPORT [/code]

July 20, 2011 by HOWTO Networking Technology Uncategorized 1

HOW TO : Use netcat (nc) on Windows 7

netcat is a swiss army tool for network/security professionals. You can use it to listen on certain ports or connect to certain ports. For example, say, you configured your firewall to allow TCP 80 traffic to your web server. But your web server is not built yet and you want to validate the rule. You can run netcat on your workstation to listen on port 80, assign the IP address of the web server to your workstation and test the rule.

If I am not mistaken, nc comes as a default tool in most of the Linux distros. You can download the windows port of the tool at http://www.securityfocus.com/tools/139

The command to have netcat listen on a specific port is “nc -l PORT_NUMBER”. If you run this on a Windows 7 machine, you will get this dreaded message “local listen fuxored: INVAL”. The fix is to run it with a -L option. So the command would like this

[code]nc -L -p 80[/code]

The -L means “listen harder, re-listen on socket close” :).. Have to dig deeper and see what it really means though. I will leave that for another blog post.

And if you want to validate that netcat is indeed listening on that port, you can connect to that port from another workstation by using nmap.

July 14, 2011 by HOWTO Networking Technology Uncategorized Windows 17

Huh…???

I was checking out the live feed from Facebook regd the video service they rolled out yesterday and noticed this comment on the live feed form.. all I can say is WTF 🙂

July 7, 2011 by Fun Rantings Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : for loop in bash

Quick post for my own reference down the road. the “for” loop comes in very handy, when you want to perform the same task on multiple items in a bash shell.

For example, I wanted to query the DNS results of a couple of sub domains (blog.gogoair.com, pr.gogoair.com, tracker.gogoair.com), I can do it the normal way (that 99% of us do 🙂 )

[code] dig blog.gogoair.com

dig pr.gogoair.com

dig tracker.gogoair.com [/code]

Or, I can use the for loop function and do this

[code] for i in {blog,pr,tracker}.gogoair.com; do echo "$i" ; dig +short "$i"; done [/code]

Got to love technology :).. Makes you lazy!!..err I meant to say productive.

Thx to Cliff for the inspiration.

June 23, 2011 by Linux Programming Uncategorized 1