The Ticket Queue

secadmin wants two clean reports off a base RHEL 9 box, and the real problem is not find. It is that nobody explained where the noise comes from.

logadmin1 needs a reference to the current audit log that survives rotation, and a way to catch the broken symlinks that went unnoticed for two days. This is inodes, hard links versus soft links, and find.

New files in the webteam's shared directory keep landing with the wrong group, and members keep deleting each other's work. The fix is two special permission bits, and knowing why the default setup fails.

A quarterly access audit needs the regular users, the top login shells, and the locked accounts pulled out of the system files, plus an in-place edit to a config that cannot be broken.

ops1 wants a disk usage checker that fails gracefully and an idempotent user-creation tool that logs everything. Real scripts with argument handling and proper exit codes.

Two contractors starting Monday, one contractor to lock without deleting, and a service account for a new analytics agent. Real useradd, usermod, and the files behind them.

A compliance audit wants password expiry policies on four accounts and passwordless sudo for the ops user, scoped to three commands. Done with chage and a validated sudoers drop-in.

Procurement delivered a second disk. dbadmin1 needs it carved into an LVM partition, a swap partition, and a plain filesystem partition, with the kernel actually seeing them before hand-off.

dbadmin1 needs a growable volume for the database files, mounted at /srv/db, that can be extended without downtime. This is the full LVM stack plus an online resize and a snapshot.

The database volume has to survive reboots, mounted by UUID. Plus a legacy ext4 volume, and the recovery drill for the broken fstab that took a box down last week.

Nightly batch jobs are getting OOM-killed. Until more RAM arrives, dbadmin1 needs swap added live, both a file and a partition, made persistent, with the faster partition used first.

dev1 needs monitoring tools installed and a local DNF repository built from a directory of RPMs, ready for an air-gapped replica that will have no internet repos.

logadmin1's backup script broke when the last admin left. Rebuild it: a daily gzip archive of /etc, a weekly bzip2 snapshot of a home directory, and a continuous rsync mirror of /var/log.

The DB team keeps dumping huge query results to /srv/db and there have been two close calls with disk fill. dbadmin1 needs per-user and per-group quotas enforced, with a usage report.

httpd is not surviving reboots and cost webadmin two hours after a kernel patch. Set it up properly with systemd, mask a daemon that should never run, and read its logs through journalctl.

logadmin1 needs a daily backup, a weekly cleanup, and a one-shot update tonight. Three scheduling tools, one for each job, all logging so you know they ran.

server1 is moving to a new VLAN tomorrow and needs a static IP, gateway, DNS, a persistent hostname, and a local hosts entry, all set with nmcli and verified with ip and ss.

A pen test flagged SSH password auth as critical. Move to key-based auth, disable passwords and root login, scope access to named users and a group, without locking yourself out.

secadmin wants a clean firewall: web open to everyone, SSH only from the management subnet, a custom port for one host, and Cockpit open for an hour. All permanent, all reloaded.

httpd serves files from /srv/webcontent but returns 403 on every request. Disabling SELinux fixes it, but you are not going to do that. Diagnose the denial and fix the file context properly.

httpd will not bind to port 8080, the app needs outbound DB connections, and a backup denial needs a custom policy module. Three SELinux fixes beyond file contexts.

nfsadmin needs a shared workspace reachable from any node. Stand up an NFS server, export it to the internal subnet, open the firewall, mount it as a client, and persist it with the flag people forget.

Instead of mounting the NFS share permanently on every box, nfsadmin wants it mounted on first access and unmounted when idle. That is autofs, with both an indirect and a direct map.

Audit logs are drifting four minutes off real time, which breaks correlation for compliance. Sync the clock with chrony and confirm timezone, hostname, and locale with the systemd control tools.

dbadmin1 wants two kernel parameters raised and made permanent, and the throughput-performance tuned profile applied, plus a way to see what tuned changed underneath.

2:47 AM call. The root password was changed during a DR drill and not written down, there is no sudo user, and root SSH is off. Recover it from the console with rd.break, without a reinstall.

Load average hit 18 on a four-core box from two runaway processes. Find the PIDs, kill them gracefully before forcing, renice a backup so it stops competing with production, and snapshot the top consumers.

An audit is in three days. journald is volatile and loses logs on reboot, a custom app facility needs its own file, and retention has to be provable. The full RHEL 9 logging stack.

The dev team's stack is moving to containers. Stand up rootless nginx and redis under an unprivileged user, with a bind-mount, a persistent volume, and SELinux staying enforcing.

Yesterday's containers vanished after a reboot. Wrap them as systemd user units so they auto-start even when nobody is logged in, and build a three-container pod for the API stack.

The last ticket in the queue. A proof of concept for Stratis as a modern alternative to LVM plus XFS: build a pool, a filesystem, take a snapshot, and see how it differs from the LVM workflow.