If you aren't yet using Puppet or Chef for managing your *nix infrastructure, you should seriously consider it. The benefits are enormous. Frankly, I don't think you __can__ manage a modern infrastructure without using Puppet, Chef, or reinventing a configuration management framework with your own custom scripts. However, you can't use both Chef and Puppet together, so which should you choose?
Blueprint reverse engineers servers Easy configuration management. Detect relevant packages, files, and source installs. Generate reusable server configs. Convert blueprints to Puppet or Chef. No DSLs, no extra servers, no workflow changes. Blueprint looks inside popular package managers, finds changes you made to configuration files, and archives software you built from source. It runs on Debian and RPM based distros with Python >= 2.6.
auszug aus dem buch, probekapitel über iproute2 liest sich ganz gut
Enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security on debian servers - I just enabled HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) markers on a bunch of web servers that offer HTTPS. It's an easy step to take, and it means that users of HSTS-compliant browsers (such as Chromium and the upcoming Firefox 4) or browsers with HSTS-compliant extensions (like Firefox's NoScript or HTTPS-Everywhere) will no longer be vulnerable to attacks like sslstrip once they have made one successful connection to the HSTS-enabled HTTPS web site.
Observes filesystem changes using the same underlying API as Spotlight Provides a graphical representation of the file activity
mod_pagespeed improves web page latency by changing the resources on that web page to implement web performance best practices.
GreenSQL is an Open Source database firewall used to protect databases from SQL injection attacks. GreenSQL works as a proxy and has built in support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. The logic is based on evaluation of SQL commands using a risk scoring matrix as well as blocking known db administrative commands (DROP, CREATE, etc). Commercial version of GreenSQL supporting Microsoft SQL Server is available here.
GoAccess is an open source real-time Apache web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal and provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual report on the fly.
