Simon Krenger

One excellent tool for Systems Management on Windows is the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which allows you to remotely execute commands and query parameters on a Windows Host. Of course, all modern Windows systems have the WMI Client installed, but what about the Linux clients?

To get the same functionality on a Linux system (I am using Debian in this example), we need to get the following two packages from this website:

So one might want to ask why you’d want to sacrifice the fantastic stability and openness of Debian to install a vanilla (= original) kernel (Debian currently has 2.6.32). There are quite a few reasons for doing so. For example, the current kernel (2.6.38) has TRIM support, which is something I am looking for when using SSDs. Also, maybe you want to have a bleeding edge kernel just for the fun of it. So lets get started.

First order of business is to download a few packages, download the latest kernel from kernel.org and then unpack the kernel in /usr/src/:

When I tried to run a scan with NMAP over my VPN connection, I received the following error:

PS C:\> nmap -sP 192.168.10.0/24
Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-11-18 09:35 W. Europe Standard Time
nexthost: Failed to determine dst MAC address for target 192.168.10.0
QUITTING!

Alright… A quick search with Google revealed the following topic: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2008/q1/81.

In my first post, I took the first steps in Solaris 10 and created a basic environment for anyone with Linux experience. Now, in Solaris I really miss the possibility to add packages via a repository. So in this post, I will set up the OpenCSW (Open Community SoftWare) repository, so people with Linux background can easily add new packages in a familiar way. This post includes all steps from the OpenCSW site.