PUBLIC MARKS from camel with tags server & environment

smtp-delay is an add-on/plug-in intended for use with qmail. It was written primarily to add banner delays and antipipelining to qmail. These two features are known to be able to block certain types of spam and virus mail sent through non-rfc-compliant SMTP engines. When I looked around for programs to add this functionality to qmail, I found only one such program, and didn't like the way it was done. BTW...I have the same objections to the way its done in sendmail 8.13.x. Since banner delays (the server pausing for some time before issuing an SMTP banner) cause every SMTP connection to take longer, I thought it would be a good idea to somehow exempt "legitimate" mail servers...or at least not subject them to long banner delays. So I decided to tune the banner delay time based on the connecting IP's reverse DNS. IPs with no rDNS get treated the worst (longest banner delay). IPs with rDNS matching a regex intended to detect dynamic/end-user IPs get a moderate delay. All other IPs get a very short banner delay...just long enough to see if they immediately pipeline (send SMTP commands before the banner's been sent). The original intent for smtp-delay was that it should be run before rblsmtpd, and simply set the RBLSMTPD environment variable if applicable, letting rblsmtpd issue the 4xx response. Pretty early on, I realized smtp-delay should be able to run standalone (without dependence on rblsmtpd to do its talking) and issue a 4xx response on its own. Lately, the spam load against our mail cluster has gotten so bad that I've started running smtp-delay after rblsmtpd, based on the idea that there's no point waiting out a long banner delay holding an open socket to an IP we have no intention of accepting mail from anyway. This reduced our concurrency by about 20%.

This article explains how you can install and configure apache2-mpm-peruser on a Debian Etch server. apache2-mpm-peruser is an MPM (Multi-Processing Module) for the Apache 2 web server, very similar to apache2-mpm-itk, but faster (almost as fast as apache2-mpm-prefork). mpm-peruser allows you to run each of your vhosts under a separate UID and GID - in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts. It is based on metuxmpm, a working implementation of the perchild MPM. The result is a sane and secure web server environment for your users, without kludges like PHP's safe_mode.

Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2. It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI's for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of. The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it. 4 AMI's are provided for load balancers, mysql databases, application servers, and a generic base image to customize. Scalr allows you to further customize each image, bundle the image and use that for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. You can make changes to one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one. The project is still very young, but we're hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform and give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.

Enomalism Beta Program ¶ The Enomalism cloud computing platform currently in beta and is available to select Enomaly partners. Please enter tickets using the New Ticket link above. Full source code is available under Browse Source. What is Enomalism? ¶ Enomalism is an open source web-based virtual infrastructure platform. Designed to answer the complexity of managing globally disperse virtual server environments. Enomalism helps to automate the transition to a cloud computing environment by reducing an IT organizations overall workload. The easy to use dashboard can help with issues including deployment planning, load balancing, automatic VM migration, configuration management, and capacity diagnosis.

The Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard (VMD) is a powerful web-based virtual server manager. Designed to answer the complexity of managing globally disperse virtual server environments. Enomalism helps to ease the transition to a virtualized environment by reducing an IT organizations overall workload. The easy to use dashboard can help with issues including deployment planning, load balancing, automatic VM migration, configuration management, and capacity diagnosis.

Pound is a reverse-proxy load balancing server. It accepts requests from HTTP / HTTPS clients and distributes them to one or more Web servers. The HTTPS requests are decrypted and passed to the back-ends as plain HTTP. It will act as: a) Server load balancer b) Reverse proxy server c) Apache reverse proxy etc d) It can detects when a backend server fails or recovers, and bases its load balancing decisions on this information: if a backend server fails, it will not receive requests until it recovers e) It can decrypts https requests to http ones f) Rejects incorrect requests h) It can be used in a chroot environment (security feature)

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions about how to create a highly available VMware Server environment on a Debian Etch system. With this tutorial, you will be able to create Virtual Machines that will be available on multiple systems with failover/failback capabilities.

Hyperic HQ is the robust IT management platform and web-based portal that lets you manage your systems, services, servers, and applications - and it's freely available under an open source license, the GNU GPL. Hyperic HQ Open Source features monitoring, alerting, auto- discovery, auto-inventory, performance monitoring over time, and the ability to determine the health of your IT environment with pinpoint accuracy. The Enterprise Subscription adds support, automated updates, and a few features.

XenMan is an intuitive, graphical management tool aimed at operational lifecycle management for the Xen virtualization platform. XenMan is built on the firm design philosophy that ease-of-use and sophistication can, and should, co-exist in a single management tool. So, XenMan should hopefully prove valuable to both seasoned Xen Administrators as well as those just seeking an introduction to Xen Virtualization. With XenMan's secure, multi-node capabilities, administrators can safely manage their entire environment from a single, centralized console. Most common administrative tasks like starting/stopping/provisioning virtual machines (Guest OS's) typically involve just a few mouse clicks with XenMan; as do server management operations like scanning OS configurations or acquiescing individual servers for maintainance.