While Zabbix can monitor a lot about the system state through agent and SNMP checks, there are situations where you may want to directly send a notification to Zabbix to inform it of a particular system state or notify it that an action has been performed. One example might be if you want to monitor … Read more
While VPNs are a great way to grant remote access to internal resources for a limited group of users, there are situations where you might want to expose an internal resource directly to the internet. For example, if you want to run a web or email server from inside your home or office you will … Read more
At the end of my previous article we had a functioning Zabbix server set up to monitor itself. To monitor other hosts, we will need to tell Zabbix about other devices on your network. The two main ways Zabbix can monitor a host are via an agent installed on the host or via SNMP. Generally … Read more
As your IT environments become larger and more complex, monitoring and alerting becomes a critical component of ensuring that your systems remain online and healthy. By collecting data about the state of your system you can be notified if a host goes down or get advance warning of an impending issue such as a disk … Read more
If you have followed my previous guide on setting up a FreeIPA domain you will now have a single FreeIPA server handling all requests. For smaller deployments this is unlikely to overload the server but it does create a single point of failure as, were this server to go down for some reason, clients would … Read more
Blocking unnecessary traffic on your network is a great way to improve performance, security and privacy. Reducing the amount of traffic leaves more bandwidth available for the traffic you actually want and blocking malicious sites reduces the risk that you will download something potentially dangerous onto your computer. It also means that if you do … Read more
As the number of Linux systems you want to manage increases, you will begin to see a need for more integrated host and user management. This allows for single sign on so you don’t need to maintain credentials for every system and simplifies creating service users to perform tasks across the whole domain such as … Read more
Previously I have described how to set up a WireGuard VPN to access your home network. In many ways I prefer WireGuard to other VPN solutions due to its better performance and faster connection times but there are various reasons why it may not always be appropriate particularly in a corporate or heavily mult-user environment. … Read more
Last week Nextcloud released version 17.0.2. While the X.0.2 release doesn’t have as many flashy new features as the first couple of releases in a major version it typically marks the point at which the Nextcloud team consider the release stable for production. For that reason it is sensible to hold off on feature updates … Read more
Typical ISP-provided home router/firewall products offer only the most basic of functionality. Most will include port forwarding, basic DHCP and some ability to customise firewall rules. However, if you’re looking to play with more advanced features such as static routes, advanced DHCP options, vlans, VPNs or advanced network filtering and monitoring these products come up … Read more