File integrity monitoring is a cornerstone of host-based intrusion detection. AIDE — Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment — creates a cryptographic baseline of your file system and compares the current state against that baseline to detect unauthorized changes. When an attacker modifies a system binary, alters a configuration file, or installs a rootkit, AIDE reports exactly […]
How to Install Jaeger for Distributed Tracing on RHEL 7 As systems evolve from monoliths to microservices, understanding the path of a single request across dozens of services becomes increasingly difficult using traditional logs and metrics alone. Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing platform originally developed by Uber Technologies and now hosted by the Cloud […]
How to Configure Huge Pages for Database Performance on RHEL 7 Database engines — particularly Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL/InnoDB — allocate and manage large memory pools for their buffer caches and shared memory segments. By default, the Linux kernel manages memory in 4 KB pages, which means that a 32 GB database buffer pool requires […]
Envoy Proxy is a high-performance, cloud-native Layer 7 proxy originally built at Lyft and now a CNCF graduated project. Unlike Nginx or HAProxy, Envoy is designed with dynamic configuration via xDS APIs and deep observability baked in, making it the proxy of choice for service meshes such as Istio. On RHEL 8 you can run […]
HashiCorp Vault is an industry-standard secrets management platform that stores, generates, and controls access to sensitive values such as API keys, database passwords, TLS certificates, and encryption keys. Unlike storing secrets in environment variables or configuration files, Vault provides audit logging, dynamic credentials with short TTLs, and fine-grained access policies. On RHEL 8, Vault installs […]
WebSockets provide a persistent, full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, making them essential for real-time applications such as chat systems, live dashboards, and collaborative tools. Nginx can act as a reverse proxy that transparently upgrades incoming HTTP connections to the WebSocket protocol and forwards them to a backend application server. This tutorial walks […]
How to Secure MySQL on RHEL 7 A default MySQL installation leaves several security gaps that can expose your databases to unauthorized access, data theft, or privilege escalation. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, taking deliberate steps to harden MySQL immediately after installation is essential for any production or internet-facing system. This guide walks through […]
How to Configure Mandatory Access Control with SELinux Policies on RHEL 7 SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is a mandatory access control (MAC) framework built into the Linux kernel and deeply integrated into RHEL 7. Unlike discretionary access control (DAC), which is based on user and group ownership, SELinux enforces fine-grained access rules based on security contexts […]
How to Configure Network QoS with tc on RHEL 7 Quality of Service (QoS) is the practice of managing network traffic to ensure that critical applications receive the bandwidth and latency guarantees they need. Linux provides a sophisticated traffic control subsystem accessible through the tc (traffic control) command, part of the iproute2 package. With tc, […]
How to Sync Time with Chrony on RHEL 7 Accurate system time is critical for nearly every networked service on a Linux server. Log correlation, SSL certificate validation, Kerberos authentication, database replication, and distributed systems all depend on clocks that are closely synchronized across machines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ships with Chrony as the […]
