What is the cloud - how to use

The word "cloud" became a buzz-word quite a while and Google search results for the word cloud is far away from real clouds in the sky. Although, many people and even web developers are quite away from understanding of what cloud is, how it works and how to take an advantage by using it. So clouds are really "cloudy".

Being a web developer this topic is in area of my interests for some time, but I always thought that clouds are for really big players. By big I assume million of clients, billions of page loads, terabytes of data, etc.. My mistake!

Recently I came across with Rackspace cloud and understood how wrong I was. It changed my understanding  into more practical way and I gave up my VPS and moved to the cloud.

Hardening linux server

If you consider yourself as Linux administrator this post might be useful for you. NSA published some nice papers with hardening Linux servers recommendations. NSA - National Security Agency - organization that is trusted. Latest version of 200 hundred pages guide in PDF for securing configuration of RHEL5. A very detailed manual, explaining general principles of secure system, including all necessary system changes, service configuration, network security, firewall, etc..

Ping monitoring

While searching for simple DSL line monitoring tool I found nothing really simple and decent. My goal is to hunt down internet connectivity instability. Since I have linux box inside, it is very easy to achieve.