The scap-security-guide changes in format with each new guide. CentOS 8 is not fully represented within the guide. The XMLs provided differ in context, so the RHEL XML must be used to generate the report but requires a small patch to do so. The CUI Profile The ssg-rhel8-ds-1.2.xml contains the profile cui, while the one for ssg-centos8-ds-1.2.xml does not. [root@admin…
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An instance of CentOS 8 is not running on a Dell or HP Enterprise level server; however, is running on a VMware Workstation on a Windows 10 laptop presents the [Firmware Bug]: the BIOS has corrupted hw-PMU resources (MSR 38d is 3) message. Every article on the internet suggests live with the message it is harmless. While that maybe the…
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I have written a couple of installation scripts to install WordPress throughout the years. This is the latest in that series to install WordPress 5 on a minimal install of CentOS8. Among the differences between this script and previous ones, is that this will be installed in it’s own directory /wordpress rather than /. Basically, write the script as seen below,…
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There are many articles on this subject, but you need to read many articles to complete a successful Spacewalk installation. There are fewer articles that tackle Spacewalk beyond the installation. Hopefully, this will fill in some of those blanks. What it is. Spacewalk is an open source Linux systems management solution. Spacewalk is the upstream community project from which the…
Read More »For the most part, I prefer to work using the terminal on a minimal install of Linux; however, there are those occasional times where the GUI is necessary. Recently faced with having to add a few desktop shortcuts to the Desktop posed a bit of a problem for me. Basically, wanted to achieve two things, a Desktop icon to launch…
Read More »A user was logged in via XRDP and the screen locked. Each attempt to logon also resulted in a locked screen. Rebooting is not an option. There needed to be a way to identify the user and forcibly log them off, and there is. Logged on as root and typing the who command lists users and logons. A great working…
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CentOS 6.x uses python 2.6 for various things. It is the default install and Python 2.7 is not available as a typical install but I had a need for it and found a solution that worked for me. The test. If you type exit, and type python -V, this will revert to the existing python version. The scl enable is…
Read More »There is a great deal of material on this subject. However, this guide is a simplistic one for my reference. If anyone should find it useful, that would be great too. Here are the steps to install VMware tools on Linux CentOS 6 and Linux CentOS 7. CentOS 6: Install VMware tools From within the VMware vSPhere Client: From within…
Read More »From the man page, xrdp is a remote desktop protocol (RDP) server. Unlike Windows, xrdp will not display a Windows desktop but an X window desktop to the user. To install on a CentOS 7 Linux box with a GUI installed, turns out to be quite simple. A prerequisite will be the EPEL repository. yum install http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm Now that EPEL…
Read More »I have written on and improved upon the installation process for Oracle’s Java JDK over the years. Creating a script with a hard-coded filename has a considerable drawback, particularly as it pertains to Java JDK. Oracle updates their product often and with a naming convention that doesn’t permit for any reasonable guess as to what the next version should be. …
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There are so many websites and YouTube videos that indicate and demonstrate that it is possible to install and use DOSBox on CentOS 7. I tried many different things which all seemed to roadblock at the prerequisite for libSDL_sound-1.0.so.1. Ranging from building from source that one specific prerequisite, where the build was apparently successful, the prerequisite still remained. A build…
Read More »A situation existed where a user needed access to a CentOS 6 server to provide support for a specific application. This application is associated with a unique username to that application. For the sake of argument, an application xyz has a user xyz which automatically puts that user in a group of the same name, xyz. The additional user whom…
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Sometime ago, I wrote an automated script to install WordPress on a CentOS 5 install of Linux. Over the years, the repos and WordPress requirements changed as did CentOS upgrades through CentOS 6. The script was modified accordingly. The script had to be modified considerably for CentOS 7 which facilitates the need for a new article. Here is an automated…
Read More »There are many tools to check the hard drive performance on Linux system. Here we are are concentrating on hdparm. A CentOS 6.7 Linux distribution is what is being used for this article. To install it, yum install -y hdparm. A sample run, hdparm -Tt /dev/sda The man pages (man hdparm) will offer many different configuration options, the two switches…
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SpamAssassin is an e-mail spam filter which uses content-matching rules. For this install, CentOS 6.6 (64-bit) and Sendmail are used. Enable EPEL repository. One way is to download and install the EPEL repository. Another is to edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo file and change enabled=0 to enabled=1 under the [epel] section. Yet another way to enable EPEL repository. Install Sendmail and spamassassin….
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A bug which could allow for arbitrary code execution has been discovered, Red Hat alerted, and patches exist. So, I simple yum update should take care of things. However, Red Hat offers command line arguments which may be used to test for the vulnerability. Using the command issued below, different warnings may appear, however, the following result is one of…
Read More » An anoyance with cloning a Linux virtual machine is that the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file may contain a UUID and HWADDR which can be removed and the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules can be deleted or zero’ed out. So, here are the steps I use to create a “template”. After cloning the system, the first screen should be the option to set a root password. Since,…
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