Recently I came across the requirement to monitor traffic for a few devices behind Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, so I put together the following method which is described here for future reference. I am using iptables to collect byte counts and poll this data through SSH from a monitoring server. The collected data gets saved in a round robin database and output as a graph using Tobias Oetiker’s geat RRDtool.
Continue reading
Command-line keyboard shortcuts
To be precise, we are talking about the “readline Emacs editing mode” keyboard shortcuts. They work in a wide variety of CLI tools, notably your bash or zsh shell. What most people don’t know is, they also work on macOS (née OS X) in any text input field.
Continue reading
Centralized logging with rsyslog
If you want a good overview over your infrastructure but don’t feel the need to install extra software like Logstash, Fluentd or Graylog there is an easy way to achieve a centralized logging facility with what’s already on board in most Linux distributions: rsyslog
Continue reading
Inspecting and manipulating .tar.gz archives using Vim
Yesterday I found out about yet another Vim feature I didn’t know about previously. You can inspect the contents of .tar.gz archives and even write to files inside the archive using my favourite editor.
A clean start – How to prepare a minimal Debian template for LXC containers
In my recent push for more virtualization I sat down today and constructed a very minimal Debian template that only has the bare necessities installed to be able to communicate on the network and operate the base-system. This template will be used to spin up LXC containers on a hypervisor, which is very fast and has virtually no overhead.
This post describes the steps you have to take to achieve the same.