An interesting post on securing Nagios!

Nagios is a monitoring software designed to let you know about problems on your hosts and networks quickly. You can configure it to be used on any network. Setting up a Nagios server on any Linux distribution is a very quick process however to make it a secure setup it takes some work. This article will not show you how to install Nagios since there are tons of them out there but it will show you in detail ways to improve your Nagios security.

Read more here : http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/144088

After having reviewed openSUSE 11.2 for my Acer Aspire Revo (which b.t.w. runs great on this box!), I've decided to go for SLES 11 due to having two applications that don't run stably (yet) on 11.2.

To my surprise SLES 11 supports the Acer's hardware just fine 'out of the box'. The challenge so far was getting SLES installed on the Acer. As it does not have a built-in CD/DVD drive, I needed to install from USB.

What's needed:

Note: If you have access to SUSE Studio, you can use that to quickly build a custom USB install. Sadly :) I don't have access yet, but managed to create a USB bootable stick quite easily following these two guides:

On the openSUSE 11.2 milestone (beta) release page there was a nice tip on how to quickly make a bootable install usb stick using the LiveCD's:

Note, if you need to try the live CD on a machine with no CD-ROM drive, you can copy it to a USB key with the following command:

dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

Replace “image.iso” with the name of the ISO image that you have downloaded, and replace “sdX” with the actual device name of your USB drive. Be careful! This will erase the target device, so make sure you have the correct device name and have any vital data backed up!

I'll be trying this on my new pet project : the Acer ASPIRE Revo 3600 Nettop :)