Tunnel all your remote connections through ssh with a linux jumpbox

As many guys working in IT, I have my own lab. I usually prefer to use my own lab as the degree of freedom I can experience cannot be compared with a corporate lab. It often happens that some specific configurations (one for all, my vCloud Director environment) are better looking in my own lab than any other place, and so I also use my lab to show those technologies to partners and customers. This is easy when I’m at home, but I may be in an hotel room, in a conference room at the customer’s site, or another different place, and in many of these situations it may happen (and it happened enough times to justify this little project) that the connections to my lab are blocked by a firewall or another device. I have two ways to connect to my lab: an RDP to a jumpbox machine, published on a different port that the usual TCP/3389, and an ipsec vpn concentrator. In one case, none of them was possible at a customer, so we ended up with a colleague of mine tethering from his phone. I decided it was time to develop a better solution that was able to work in almost any situation. And my solution involves the always amazing SSH.

Veeam Extract Utility, quick restores without the Veeam server

One of the biggest misconceptions about Veeam Backup & Replication, often fueled by competitors, is that it requires the complete server installation in order to run restores. So, this becomes a Single Point of Failure, just like many other solutions from competitors. This is completely untrue: there are two main features in Veeam that make restores possible even without the server installation.

La gestione dell’orologio in una VM Linux

Abbiamo parlato ieri della gestione dell’orologio in una VM Windows. Vediamo oggi come fare la stessa cosa con una VM Linux. Innanzitutto, attenzione al kernel che usate: se avete una VM multiprocessore, USATE i kernel SMP. Kernel non corretti sono la primissima causa del “time drift”. Secondo, è possibile passare al kernel alcuni parametri, che […]

HotAdd di RAM a una macchina linux 64 bit, il “gradino” dei 3Gb

Una delle funzioni più “cool” di vsphere, anche se meno note, è la possibilità di aggiungere a caldo ram a quei sistemi operativi che supportano questa funzione. In questo modo si può togliere d’impaccio un server sovraccarico azzerando completamente il downtime necessario al reboot. Tra i sistemi che supportano questa funzione c’è ovviamente linux. Potrebbe […]