It now seems that scammers are targeting your donations to Haiti victims. Responding to the heart wrenching images seen on television, internet and other media, the common man is trying to reach out through various charities. And this is exactly what the scammers want to put their grubby hands into.

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We all know that a server’s stability is dependent on its load, directly. Load, in computing, is a measure of the amount of processing a computer is currently performing, usually as some variation on a percentage. Load spike is something from which you would always want your servers to stay away from.

This article mainly focus on finding the probable causes for a high load. I hope this article will help you in fighting those load spike nightmares.

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Linux is a premium force in the web hosting industry, which is also achieving popularity as a PC operating system nowadays. When it comes to hosting a website, Linux web servers are primarily chosen due to their flexibility, stability and security of services. But as we all know, security of all operating systems revolve around controlling access and is hence subject to exploits. Since Linux is open source, vulnerabilities can be easily exploited by potential attackers to gain illegal access to a web server. As a measure of securing Linux at every level, from the kernel up, Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) was developed.

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Kerberos is one among several authentication protocols that are used as a part of security systems. Basically, it is a network authentication protocol designed to provide strong authentication and confidentiality for client/server and multi-tier applications. LDAP, on the other hand is a method of organizing the details and providing access to it. It is mostly used for user, service and machine details, and is incredibly useful.

Kerberos and LDAP are both popular, when considered separately. And when you put them together, it provides an even more powerful solution for secure authentication.

Through this article, I wish to demonstrate how to INTEGRATE Kerberos with LDAP to provide a strong means of user authentication and authorization. The implementation explained in this article has been tested on Ubuntu 9.04. Before getting into the details, let me take you through the common terms that are used here.

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For over a decade, several organizations used the Network Information Services (NIS) to render the central management of identity and policy for users and machines in the Linux and Unix environment. However, NIS had some serious infirmities that caused its failure to certain security compliance audits.

NIS is rather insecure for today’s standards. Host authentication mechanisms are not available and all information is passed unencrypted, over the network. Due to this, extreme care has to be taken while setting up a network that uses NIS.

Red Hat Enterprise IPA will help to enable significant risk reduction and efficiency gains for the IT industry. IPA stands for Identity, Policy, and Audit. RHE IPA aims to simplify the central management of the identity of users and machines, policies configuration and access control, and audit. The present release - RHE IPA 1.0 - takes care of “Identity” part. “Policy” and “Audit” are scheduled for future releases.

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