3. Adding new devices to cacti

A device can be anything which is SNMP enabled. It could be a router, a switch….

In our example, we are going to add the server we configured in the first part of this tutorial. The server is on localhost, but it could be anywhere on a network, as long as our manager host is allowed to connect to its SNMP port.

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Now that we have our snmp server up and running, we are going to install cacti to manage the snmp server in our network.

2. Installing Cacti

Cacti displays system statistics through a PHP/MySQL web interface.

To gather informations, it runs a script which is going to poll the servers you registered in cacti: /usr/share/cacti/site/poller.php.

So, let’s get started an install cacti.

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4. Configure ProFTPd:

ProFTPd main configuration file is /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf. On Debian, proFTPd over the capability of including files from the main configuration file. Thus, we are going to create a file call /etc/proftpd/mysql.conf which we will include from the main file.
This has the advantage that if the new config is not working, we can easily comment our include and fall back to the previous config.

So, get ready with your favorite text editor, edit /etc/proftpd/mysql.conf and put the following inside:

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Using ProFTPD and its SQL module for MySQL, it is possible to give FTP access to non system users.
By doing so, one can give access to a Virtual User which is only allowed to use the FTP service.

This Tutorial will show how to create and populate the user and group tables as well as configure proftpd in order to use the MySQL backend.

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2. Configuring the clients

Each client will need a set of packages. So, now that you are logged on one of your clients, install:

#apt-get install libnss-ldap libpam-ldap nscd
LDAP Account for root: cn=admin,dc=debuntu,dc=local
Password: XXXX
Make local root database admin: yes
Database require logging in: No
Root login account: cn=admin,dc=debuntu,dc=local
Root login password: XXXX

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LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) allows central user, group, domain….. authentication, information storage …

Using LDAP in a local network, you can allow your users to login and authenticate from anywhere on your network.

This tutorial will be split in 2 parts. In the first part, I will explain how-to install, configure the LDAP server, add a few users and group, in the second part, we will set up Linux client to authenticate through LDAP if the user does not exist on the local filesystem.

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This tutorial will show how to set samba to allow read-only file sharing for your LAN computers as guest (without be prompted for a password).
Because users won’t be prompted for a user/password, this tutorial is meant to be installed in a LAN where all host are to be trusted.

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4. Disabling Authentication by password

In order to disable authentication by password, we need to connect as root on the remote machine. On connected, go and edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and make sure you have the following setting:

….
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
PasswordAuthentication no
UsePAM no
…

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2. Adding the public key to the authorized key

In the first place, we need to upload the key to the remote machine:

user@host:~$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remoteuser@remotehost:~/

Now, the public key is uploaded, let’s add it to the authorized keys. To do so, we are going to connect to remotehost as remoteuser and add the key at the end of file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and delete it once added:

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Open SSH is the most widely used SSH server on Linux. Using SSH, one can connect to a remote host and gain a shell access on it in a secure manner as all traffic is encrypted.

A neat feature of open SSH is to authenticate a user using a public/private key pair to log into the remote host. By doing so, you won’t be prompted for the remote user’s password.

This tutorial will describe how to create a SSH public/private key pair, how to enable key based authentication and finally how to disable password authentication.

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