Yesterday, Logstash 1.4.0 was released containing many improvements, one of which was contributed by us. We’ve implemented signature verification and packet decryption in the collectd input plugin. This blogpost will give an overview of how encryption and signing is used in the collectd binary protocol. If you want to implement your own collectd receiver, this is pretty interesting.

One of the things we take very serious here at Kumina is our monitoring. We’ve always done so, but even we must admit that during the starting years, we sometimes forgot to include all possible checks for a new service or host. And it sucks when you forget to setup the monitoring for a specific item, because you generally only find out about it when it’s actually down already… We like to check as much as possible (if not everything). Here’s an explanation on how we actually deploy our monitoring and trending based on the applications that are installed.

We’ve written a check for detecting the Fokirtor backdoor.

Our upstream-provider needed to change the VLAN-ID of our uplink to be in line with their policies. We wanted to do this with minimal downtime. Check out the script we ran on the gateway machines, the VLAN-IDs were changed almost instantly, total unavailability was less than a second.

Recently we’ve been busy implementing a new DNS infrastructure for our resolvers as well as our authoritative servers. We wanted to be ready for future developments like DNSSEC and we wanted to re-new this important part of our infrastructure for a while. This blog-post gives an overview of our new setup.

How to solve the ‘No module named svn’ Trac error.

We’ve created a simple check to detect Linux/CDorked.A infections on webservers.

Yesterday evening we returned from LOADays 2013 in Antwerp, This blogpost describes some things we learned and want to implement in the (near) future.