Category: GNU/LINUX SYSADMIN

Get yourself acquainted with mock to build rpm

Anoop C SLeave a comment

Package management is one the key areas in the world of GNU/Linux system administration. Not only for system administrators but also for normal linux users it is an inevitable part that they need to be aware of in their day to day job. Even though hundreds of linux distros exist around us, number package management systems are very limited (in numbers). dpkg used by Debian with .deb format, RPM created by Red Hat with .rpm format, pacman used in Arch linux, portage by Gentoo etc are some of the popular ones among them. Considering the most used RPM and DEB packages, they both have proven to work flawless. It’s just a matter of personal taste to select one from the other. Here we discuss on how to build RPM based packages for different distros which makes you of .rpm to install softwares. Here is how a rpm package would like:

<name>-<version>-<release>.<architecture>.rpm
such as:

samba-4.2.3-1.fc23.x86_64.rpm

where <name> is samba, <version> is 4.2.3, <release> is 1.fc23 and <architecture> is x86_64. <release> part is often a combination of a positive integer with a distribution tag appended at its end. See here for more details.

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Set up internet connection using PPPoE on Fedora

Anoop C SLeave a comment

I don’t know how many of you have heard about this term called “PPPoE” which stands for Point-to-Point-Protocol over Ethernet. Even though this article is not intended to explain in detail about this protocol, in order to have a general understanding let’s go through the common concepts of PPP and PPPoE briefly.

PPPoE as a derivate of PPP
Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is a data link protocol used to establish a direct connection between two nodes. It can provide connection authentication, transmission encryption and compression. PPP is also used over internet access connections. Two derivatives of PPP, Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) and Point-to-Point Protocol over ATM (PPPoA) are most commonly used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to establish a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) internet service connection with customers. The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) is a network protocol for encapsulating PPP frames inside ethernet frames.

Establish a PPPoE connection
This would normally require a authenticated DSL connection via phone line, trunk line, optical fibre etc. So I would assume that you have Read More »

Compiling Linux kernel with Rich ACL support

Anoop C SLeave a comment

I don’t know how many of you have heard about Rich ACL or Rich Access Control Lists. Most of you might have heard about NFS protocol i.e, the Network File System protocol. This particular protocol, with its v4.0 and above defines a particular set of ACLS known as NFSv4 ACLs. Rich ACL is a modified or an extended form of NFSv4 ACLs. Let me explain in brief on what do we mean by ACLs.

ACL or Access Control List ?
This is a list of permissions attached to an object. The object can be file, directories and so on. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects.

ACLs and Linux
Linux follows the POSIX 1003.1e draft 17 standard for defining and storing ACLs. Even then in linux, getfacl and setfacl command line utilities do not strictly follow POSIX 1003.2c draft 17, which shows mostly in the way they handle default ACLs. For detailed explanation on how ACLs are defined and how they work in linux, please see http://users.suse.com/~agruen/acl/linux-acls/online/ .

Variations in ACL implementations
The ACL model implemented by the various versions of Windows is more powerful and complex than POSIX ACLs, and differs in several aspects. These differences create interoperability problems on both sides which is a disadvantage for UNIX-like systems. To address this issue, several UNIX-like systems started to support additional ACL models based on version 4 of the the Network File System (NFSv4) protocol specification. Linux is lacking this support so far. Following are some of the differences between various ACLs

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