DIY Security Camera System

If you are in the market for an inexpensive security DVR/CCTV system, I might have a solution for you.  First, you’ll need a computer to install the video surveillance software on.  If you need something compact and low powered, I would suggest going with a computer like the decTOP.  You can pick up a decTOP [...]

If a network crashes and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

What do you do when your network is down?  How do you notify your users/customers there’s a problem if you can’t send out an email or post something to a website?  At my day job, I’m the sysadmin for a medium sized network and I occasionally encounter this problem.  Here are a couple solutions I’ve [...]

OSSEC 1.5 is out

If you’re looking for host based intrusion detection software, I would highly recommend checking out OSSEC.  Version 1.5 was released on May 1st, and the new features look awesome.  Installation is simply a matter of downloading the gzipped tar, extracting the files, and running the install.sh script.  You can run OSSEC in either a client/agent [...]

Hardy Upgrades

So far, I’ve upgrade three Ubuntu workstations and two servers to Hardy Heron 8.04.  Of those five upgrades, I only had problems with one of the workstation upgrades.  The other workstation and server upgrades were painless.  The workstation upgrade I had a problem with was due, I think, to my Nvidia video driver.  I ended [...]