NOC provides hosting services for development teams where they code websites/applications. We have numerous development teams with heterogeneous client tasks. For most of the times we can’t provide shared environment for heterogeneous development stacks because of there different needs. Development teams then have to show progress to clients which requires live access. In some special cases, sub-domains also require separate live IPs.
You may know that IPv4 addresses are exhausting and an organization can’t have live IP for every virtual …

Vulnerability assessment is a crucial phase in setting up server security in order to determine if and where a system can be exploited and/or threatened. Services exposed publicly open the door to potential security breaches which should be known before they can be exploited for nefarious purposes.
When performing an external assessment in vulnerability assessment, you are attempting to assess the compromisability of your systems from the outside. Being external to your company provides you with the attacker’s viewpoint. You see …

GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager with Wiki and issue tracking features. Recently in a project, we had to integrate GitLab with LDAP server for users authentication. The purpose of this implementation was to allow users to sign in GitLab server with their LDAP credentials.
GitLab LDAP Environment:
The first time a user signs in with LDAP credentials, GitLab will create a new GitLab user associated with the LDAP Distinguished Name (DN) of the LDAP user. GitLab user attributes …

One of the most important and critical factor in the functioning of IT Industry is Services up-time. It is significant as it is linked directly to administrative support provided to the clients. The importance of Services up-time is also highlighted by the fact that at times we are limited to perform any additional configuration, modification and package installation on client’s server to analyze the issues.
Problem:
The major issue was related to PostgreSQL service startup issue on Linux based server.
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Being system administrators, we face different challenges and provide suitable solutions. Recently we had to synchronize data between two servers. Maintaining backups and synchronizing servers are routine tasks, but flawlessly synchronizing TBs of data in real-time was a new challenge.
There are many ways to keep data synchronized and different tools are used for this. For example, “rsync” is a famous utility for doing that but we had to provide a flawless solution so we considered different tools to do …

We use Nagios to monitor our in-house & client managed server. The purpose of Nagios is to provide a graphical view of all the services running on Servers; for example Data Center Temperature, System Up-time, System Memory Usage, System Load, Ping Result , Apache Status etc. It allows us to monitor all the servers from a central place without logging in to every server to check it’s status every time.
Kannel with Nagios:
Kannel is an open-source SMS Gateway. We …

We have almost 30+ Servers (VM’s & Physical Machines) which are hosted in-house & in a US based Data Center plus the Servers of Clients in our active monitoring system. To monitor these Servers actively, we have to check certain  services on these machines e.g (SSH Service, Apache, MySQL, System Memory Usage, System Load, System Uptime and System Disk Status etc).
Just imagine, is it possible for anyone to monitor all the 30+ Servers for all these above mentioned Services …

Shared Hosting accounts have their own advantages of providing the same stack to multiple users in their own controlled-user environment which eases the process of delegating control to user as well as controlling backups and rollbacks.
PROBLEM:
Many a times, we as NOC, have been requested to add a specific file to all the shared hosting accounts for security reasons e.g a shared-hosting stack used for hosting “staging” environments (development preview before actually going live) was being indexed by Google …

MySQL Databases are the core of most web applications and access to a database needs to be fast for an application to have a reasonable load time.
When an online business attracts people, it attracts traffic which in return generates a lot of web server and database activity. It reaches a point where a single node deployment becomes a problem and the business becomes unavailable due to large sums of traffic at any given time.
Our client wanted to migrate …