Archive for the 'How's To' Category

Set a Good Password Policy On SuSE Linux

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Sometimes setting a good password policy is not easy and you may receive many complaint from end user especially non-IT related users. Normally they like password = password = abc123 as easy as possible.
Personally I don’t like pam_cracklib and I would preferred pam_passwdqc.
The pam_passwdqc module is a simple password strength checking module for PAM. In [...]

How To Check Which Port Is Listern or Open on Linux

Friday, September 12th, 2008

For some security reason you may configure SSH or any other protocol using different kind of port number on Linux server. Sometimes it’s important to know which ports are actually listern or open to the system network, it may open for network instruction or hacking.
Basically there are few methods to see which ports are [...]

How To Force User Change Password At Next Login on Linux

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

My previous post talked about How To Show Linux User Password Expires. I would like to share “How to force user change password at next login on Linux“.
Option 1:
passwd command - change user password
Use the following syntax:
passwd -e

-e Force the user to [...]

How to Disable CTRL-ALT-DEL shutdown key on Linux server

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

[Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Delete] is a shortcut key to shutdown/reboot the server without having to log on but sometimes it will be a problem by accidently pressing the [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Delete] key in the production Linux server console. In order to prevent the use of [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Delete] key combination on a production server, we MUST disable it.
Basically it is configured [...]

Basic vmware-cmd VM Management tips

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Sometimes using a command line is much more faster than using GUI. Personally I found VMware Virtual Center always have bugs. The following article will guide you how to use vmware-cmd VM management tool for some basic VMware administrative tasks.
The figure below illustrates states, transitions, and state changing commands for virtual machines.

List path and names [...]