Virtual private network (VPN) technology has changed immensely since the publication of the original Guide to IPsec VPNs (SP 800-77) in 2005. The guide was recently reworked and modernized, and Red Hat engineers lent a hand to updating this important document. The updated document takes into consideration the evolution of cryptography, software and hardware capabilities,…

Once upon a time, the term “product documentation” conjured images of ring-bound tomes several thousand pages long that would get shipped to users alongside the latest offering. In the days before the internet, this wasn’t just the best option available; it was the only option. It was big, it was slow, and it was expensive,…

Seeing a demo of Session Recording in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was an eye-opener for me because it may change the way we manage systems. Let’s take a look at what you can do with session recording and where it comes in handy for troubleshooting. Session recording can help system administrators track and trace…

We’ve all been in situations where something works on one system, but not another, and we’re not sure why. Perhaps your boss is asking “Why does this work in the test environment, but not production?” and you need an answer as soon as possible.  In the past when this has happened, I would open SSH…

This month marks the five year anniversary since Red Hat acquired Ansible, and since then, much has changed in the IT automation world. IT organizations have always faced continual pressure to support rapid innovation at-scale, but 2020 has been an especially challenging year. Organizations required solutions that delivered fast responses to changing business requirements, and automation…

Application allowlisting is the practice of specifying an index of approved applications or executable files that are permitted to run on a system by a specific user. This is often used on a multi-user system or some kind of a shared hosting server, where multiple users exist and they have to be given limited permissions, so…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.5 introduced the “boom” utility for managing LVM snapshot and image boot entries. This new functionality could be very helpful for system administrators, especially those responsible for RHEL servers running directly on physical hardware, where booting from snapshots has previously been more difficult.   This post will cover the…

When we unveiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 at Red Hat Summit 2019, our primary focus was to deliver innovation while keeping enterprise IT’s needs for production reliability and operational compatibility front-and-center. With this launch came a predictable, six month release cadence for minor releases which continues today with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 beta. With global…

In this final entry for the container security series, we’ll look at network traffic control for containers running in Red Hat OpenShift.  In a Multi-Level Security (MLS) environment, you will want to be able to ensure that containers in different security levels can only talk to pods in the same security level. For instance, a…

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, we added new container features including full support for rootless Podman, Podman Play/generate Kube, and container images for the Golang toolset (“A minor release with major new container capabilities“). Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 hits the ground with an even bigger set of features.  Here’s a quick summary: Update…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2 will be GA soon, and brings new features and improvements to existing ones across the board. RHEL 8.2 includes installation enhancements and a better in place upgrade experience, to resource management for optimizing workloads on large systems, to new container tools to improve use of RHEL and the Red…

When choosing an operating system for running database workloads like Microsoft SQL Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers several unique advantages. But why is this the case? When it comes to picking a database for your mission-critical application, performance is a crucial decision factor. In fact, delivering low latency, and high-throughput application responses comes…

As I was reading through the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta release notes, one thing that caught my eye was that a session recording solution had been added to RHEL 8 Beta, which allows for users’ terminal sessions to be recorded and played back at a later time.   Before coming to Red Hat…

Satellite and Ansible Tower are each powerful tools, and many customers utilize both of them. It is possible to integrate these tools and in part 1 of this series we covered how to configure Ansible Tower to pull a dynamic inventory of hosts from Satellite.  One of Satellite’s features is the ability to provision new hosts, while…

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the latest beta version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2, is now available. Maintaining our commitment to a predictable, six-month release cadence for minor platform releases, RHEL 8.2 Beta is designed to make it easier for IT organizations to adopt new, production-ready innovations…

This week, Microsoft certified its SQL Server 2019 release for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The new version of SQL Server adds Linux support for Replication and Change Data Capture (CDC), distributed transactions (MSDTC), machine learning (in Java, Python, and R), and data virtualization (Polybase) across structured and unstructured data sources.  For RHEL 8,…