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Unfortunately Red Hat/Centos comes with NTFS support built in. This I personally find annoying mainly because I find I often have to work with windows file systems but thankfully it's easy to work around. Here is how to add NTFS support and install ntfsprogs to your RHEL/Centos box:

First and for most you need to find out what version your running. You do this by running the uname command to see what you're running. It will say something like this:

# uname -r
2.6.18-92.1.10.el5

Write this down because this will tell you what module you will need to install. Now go to SourceForge and download the version module you need with the latest ntfsprogs. For example, for my version 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 I needed to install kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5-2.1.27-0.rr.10.11.i686.rpm.

Today I was reading through a how-to on installing ntop on Red Hat Enterprise and CentOS Linux. Usually I can follow these how-to's and never run into any trouble, but when I followed this one I ran into a few issues during the installation process. Here is one of the errors I ran into:

configure: error: Unable to find RRD at /usr/local/rrdtool: please use --with-rrd-home=DIR

Before I get to ahead of myself you should know I was installing ntop on CentOS 5.2 with the base and development tools installed. If you already have your box built then you may want to make sure you have the development tools installed. You can do this by running the following:

[root@localhost ~]# yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'

I'm also running this on a dual homed host, eth0 is the management interface and what I use to ssh, log into ntop, etc while eth1 is in promiscuous mode on a port that is mirrored on my switch with the port that goes to my internet link. With this configuration ntop is seeing all the traffic coming, going, and broadcasted on my network.

Now I did have rrdtool installed but for some reason it just wouldn't take the path no matter what I tried. So I removed the rrdtool rpm package and decided to install it from source.

I'm currently supporting 2 sites that are about a mile apart. I've got a T1 that bridges the 2 networks together but I wanted some redundancy (not to mention a faster connection). So I decided to invest in a couple of Cisco 1300 wireless bridges which would give us a 54mb link. The problem was I wanted to test them, along with the routing, in a lab environment. I had a couple spare 2600's laying around so I connected them up and did some searching. After a while I came across this page that shows you how to make a loop back end both physically and logically for your router. Thats fine if you only want to test your CSU/DSU, but I wanted to actually make a T1 cable to test the routes to make sure they worked the way I needed them to before I applied them to the production network. So just for kicks I yanked out a few feet of Cat5 and created a T1 cable that basically mirrored the loopback on both ends. Believe it or not, it worked great and I had a full 1.54mb connection between the CSU/DSU's.

Here is a picture to show how I made it along with how to make a physical loopback T1:

As the title says, welcome! I've been wanting to create a simple site to share some of my findings as I learn things that have to do with Technology. I plan on posting hardware hacks, scripts, info on Linux & BSD (& maybe some windows stuff), and whatever else tickles my fancy. I hope you enjoy my site as it grows. Please check back often, I plan on posting at least once a week.

A little bit about me:
I've worked in network administration & security for over 5 years professionally. I currently work for a company in northern Indiana (USA) as a Network Administrator. My hobbies include robotics & electronics (when I get to dabble), anything about Linux and BSD, networking, and just about everything that has to do with network security.

Thanks for visiting!

--Riv