High-End Linux Consulting and Security

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Projects

• Setup of a monitoring solution for the technology of the parking decks in Mainz based on Nagios, NagVis and PNP4Nagios.
• Documentation for end users and administrators.
• The main focus here was to create a graphical front-end with NagVis which is nice and easy to use. For that I created some new iconsets and arranged them in NagVis so that the status of all parking decks can be viewed on one screen.
• The Nagios configuration has been structured in a way that different views of the parcking deck technology can be displayed in NagVis: e.g. according to location, according to the type of the devices, etc..
• The long-term logging of all the data and its graphical presentation has been realised with PNP4Nagios.
• This flexible open source solution saved more than 5000 Euro initial licence fees compared to a solution with Microsofts SCOM (System Center Operations Manager)!

• Setup of a GPFS cluster.
• Installation of lin_taped with driver and utilities.
• Creation of necessary udev rules for the IBM tape devices.

• Writing of a bash script to clean up the web content of customers after a successful hacking attack.

• As-is analysis of the existing monitoring environment.
• Rough concept for setting up Nagios, NRPE, check_multi and check_logfiles with central configuration.
• Concept for a Nagios configuration frontend which allows large-scale modifications of the Nagios configuration. Every change can be made on an arbitray number of hosts and/or services. This frontend also serves as an interface to existing systems and generates a new Nagios configuration automatically based on the data of those systems. Thus, the monitoring is integrated in the IT environment and the Nagios configuration remains up-to-date.
• Definition of processes for operation and maintenance of this archticture.
• Evaluation of Thruk and MK Livestatus.

• Porting of checks from the existing monitoring system to Nagios.
• Writing of SPEC files and RPM packaging for all Nagios components.
• Connecting Nagios to a Netcool console via syslog-ng, logger and bash scripts. Every check result is sent to Netcool. Acknowledgements are synchronized between Nagios and Netcool. A heart beat is sent from Nagios to Netcool.
• Usage of check_multi with central configuration. "Feed passive" tested.
• Writing of additional Nagios plugins as bash scripts.
• Writing of helper scripts for several operations via external commands which are not yet supported by the Nagios web interface.
• Customizing of the Nagios web frontend.
• Creation of new init scripts.
• Configuration of several services like Postfix and syslog/syslog-ng.

• Testing of the performance impact if nsca encryption is enabled in a distributed Nagios environment.
• Using of OCP daemons for performance improvement.
• Writing of a script which allows to analyse the performance of every single Nagios plugin.
• Writing of bash skripts to automate load testing for an arbitray number of running Nagios instances, hosts and services.
• Nagios performance tuning so that more than 2000 servers with more than 51000 services can be monitored on a single machine with 8 cpu cores. The average host and service latency is below 0.5 seconds. The check interval is 5 minutes.

• Creation of diagrams and presentations.
• Very detailed documentation as word documents and wiki pages.

• Nagios 3 training on SLES 11, with NConf, PNP4Nagios and NagVis. Workshop with ready-to-run Nagios VMware images for all participants.

• Translation of the whole web presence into English.

• OS and web server hardening. Setup of a web application firewall.
• Adjustment of the WAF rule set to various web applications.

• Design and test of a deployment for a hardened Apache reverse proxy. The absolute maximum of security was required with modifications of the source code, the deployment of a web application firewall, etc.

• Training for Cacti, rrdtool and snmp on SLES 10.

• Set-up of GPFS for a HA cluster on SLES 10.
• udev configuration for IBM tape and changer.

• General consulting regarding Nagios and Cacti.
• Creating of special data templates and their associated data queries in Cacti for temperature and fan speed measuring.
• Programming of PHP scripts to import these snmp values into Cacti.
• The challenge here was that the snmp data was not provided in an index-based structure and could not be walked. Additionally there was the requirement that several IP addresses had to be associated with one single device in Cacti.
• Training for the Cacti plugins Discovery and Weathermap along with detailed documentation.

• Setting up the hardware raid for an IBM xSeries 306m server.
• New installation and configuration of SLES 11.
• Manual installation of the IBM tape driver lin_tape, installation of the daemon lin_taped and the tape utilities IBMtapeutil.

• I have worked on my own server and my web site including marketing and SEO. I improved my skills in Linux security.

• Setup of a monitoring solution based on Cacti and Nagios on Ubuntu Linux.
• Configuration of the local Postfix mail server as relay client.

• Basic installation of Debian Etch
• Compiling of Nagios and Cacti
• Creating and configuration of databases in MySQL
• Modification of the Debian packages of Groundwork Monitor Community Edition
• Writing of a bash script for mass importing new servers into Nagios and Cacti
• Writing of Nagios checks as bash scripts
• Modification of existing Perl Nagios checks
• Debugging of the Spine source code (C)
• Testing of existing Cacti plugins
• Writing of a Cacti plugin (just the framework, no access to the Cacti API)
• Direct queries of Cacti archives with rrdtool
• Creating of snmp requests for an Isilon-MIB of an Isilon Storage Cluster
• Writing of a detailed documentation in Confluence

• PHP / YAML / MySQL project for the administration of audio recordings.

Permanent positions

• Setup and operation of the Nagios monitoring server
• Apache web server with several hundred domains
• Writing of mod_rewrite rules
• Relocations of web servers
• Setup of a LVS cluster with redundant load balancers
• Web server with PHP load balancing
• Installation of web software like OTRS, forums, CMS
• MySQL Master-Master replication
• Running Bind with more than 1000 domains
• Writing of scripts in Bash and Perl
• Writing of a small program in C which detects malicious processes
• Configuration of a Watchguard Firebox
• Firewalls with iptables
• Analysis of hacked servers
• Administration of SSL certificates
• Research and tests to increase the security of the servers
• Log analysis of Qmail logs
• Writing of a whitelist patch for the ra-plugin rblchecks of Qmail (C)
• Support for customers and employees
• Trainings given for SELinux and Cfengine
• Setup of DELL servers and integration in our rack in the data center
• I investigated procedures in our IT department to split them to processes
• Surveys with LimeSurvey
• Evaluation of hardware and software products
• On-call duty

• Support for Linux and Windows servers
• Official contact person for English customers
• Support for DSL, DSL hardware, domains und sales

Advanced training