PUBLIC MARKS from falko

This guide shows how to remove a failed hard drive from a Linux RAID1 array (software RAID), and how to add a new hard disk to the RAID1 array without losing data.

This tutorial shows how you can back up Linux and Windows systems with BackupPC. BackupPC acts as a server and is installed on a Linux system, and from there it can connect to all Linux and Windows systems in your local network to back them up and restore them without interfering with the user's work on that system. On the clients minimal to no configuration is needed. BackupPC supports full and incremental backups, and it comes with a neat web frontend for the administrator and normal user so that backups and recoveries can be managed through a web browser. It should be noted, however, that BackupPC does file-based backups, not bit-wise backups like Ghost4Linux, for example, so it is not made for disk/partition imaging.

This article shows how to set up your own news-voting website with Pligg. Pligg is a content-management system published under the Affero General Public License, and it is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database for storing its data. With a little work you can create your own community and let users vote news to the front page.

This article shows how you can modify the partitioning of your Linux system with GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) without losing data. This includes resizing partitions (enlarging and shrinking), moving partitions on the hard drive, creating and deleting partitions, and even modifying filesystem types. GParted is a free partition editor available as a desktop program and also as a Live-CD. It supports the following filesystems: ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, reiserfs, reiser4, ufs, xfs, and even ntfs (Windows).

This document describes how to attach modems to a Linux box and allow it to receive calls to connect users to the network. It is like being your own ISP (Internet Service Provider). If your Linux box is connected to the Internet, then the users will also be connected to the Internet. Your Linux box becomes a router. This is also known as RAS (Remote Access Services) in the Microsoft world. In the Linux world it is called PPP (Point to Point Protocol).

This guide covers the installation of XenExpress and the creation of virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress is the free virtualization platform from XenSource, the company behind the well known Xen virtualization engine. XenExpress makes it easy to create, run and manage Xen virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress can run up to 4 virtual machines at the same time with a max. total amount of 4GB RAM. The XenExpress installation CD contains a full Linux distribution which is customized to run XenExpress.

This article describes how to install the new native Linux Flash Player 9 from Adobe on an Ubuntu Edgy Eft desktop so that it can be used within Firefox. The procedure works for other Ubuntu versions and Debian as well.

This guide shows how to work with LVM (Logical Volume Management) on Linux. It also describes how to use LVM together with RAID1 in an extra chapter. As LVM is a rather abstract topic, this article comes with a Debian Etch VMware image that you can download and start, and on that Debian Etch system you can run all the commands I execute here and compare your results with mine. Through this practical approach you should get used to LVM very fast.

This guide describes how you can automatically scan files uploaded by users through a web form on your server using PHP and ClamAV. That way you can make sure that your upload form will not be abused to distribute malware. To glue PHP and ClamAV, we install the package php5-clamavlib/php4-clamavlib which is rather undocumented at this time. That package is available for Debian Etch and Sid and also for Ubuntu Dapper Drake and Edgy Eft.

This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with Ghost4Linux. Ghost4Linux is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally.

This article is about resizing ext3 partitions without losing data. It shows how to shrink and enlarge existing ext3 partitions and how to merge two ext3 partitions. This can be quite useful if you do not use LVM and you realize that your existing partitioning does not meet your actual needs anymore.

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This tutorial shows how to install and use ntfs-3g on an Ubuntu Edgy Eft desktop to read from and write to Windows NTFS drives and partitions. It covers the usage of internal NTFS partitions (e.g. in a dual-boot environment) and of external USB NTFS drives.

This tutorial shows how to create a Debian/Ubuntu mirror for your local network with the tool apt-mirror. Having a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror is good if you have to install multiple systems in your local network because then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.

This is a description of how to set up a secure tunnel between your MySQL Server and a locally running MySQL Administrator using Putty. By creating a secure tunnel to your MySQL server using Putty, you can grant localhost access to powerful applications like MySQL Administrator while at the same time, make your server appear as if it isn't even there. In effect, make your MySQL server disappear from the outside world.

This tutorial is about wardriving using GPS. It explains how to install Garmin Etrex on Ubuntu and how to configure it. It also shows how to use Garmin with GPSDrive and how to convert the data to an xml file which can be imported by Google Earth.

Virtualization is a good practice for servers, since it makes things more secure, scalable, replacable, and replicable, all this at the cost of little added complexity. This guide was written during an install of a Supermicro machine with two dual-core opterons (64-bit), two identical disks (for RAID) and a load of memory. Why OpenVZ and not XEN or the recent KVM kernel module? Well, XEN is not very stable for 64-bit architectures (yet), and it comes with quite a bit of overhead (every VM runs its own kernel) due to its complexity. KVM is very simple but restricts you to run a kernel as one process, so the VM cannot benefit from multi core systems.

Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on Debian Sarge systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there.

This tutorial shows how to set up a PXE (short for preboot execution environment) install server with Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). A PXE install server allows your client computers to boot and install a Linux distribution over the network, without the need of burning Linux iso images onto a CD/DVD, boot floppy images, etc. This is handy if your client computers don't have CD or floppy drives, or if you want to set up multiple computers at the same time (e.g. in a large enterprise), or simply because you want to save the money for the CDs/DVDs. In this article I show how to configure a PXE server that allows you to boot multiple distributions: Ubuntu Edgy/Dapper, Debian Etch/Sarge, Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4.4, OpenSuSE 10.2, and Mandriva 2007.

This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSuSE 10.2 based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS), BIND DNS server, ProFTPd server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.).

You already installed Linux on your networked desktop PC and now you want to work with files stored on some other PCs in your network. This is where autofs comes into play. This tutorial shows how to configure autofs to use CIFS to access Windows or Samba shares from Linux Desktop PCs. It also includes a tailored configuration file.

I guess you all know this: you are connected to your server with SSH and in the middle of compiling some software (e.g. a new kernel) or doing some other task which takes lots of time, and suddenly your connection drops for some reason, and you lose your labour. This can be very annoying, but fortunately there is a small utility called screen which lets you reattach to a previous session so that you can finish your task. This short tutorial shows how to use screen for just this purpose.

This guide describes how to generate and use a private/public key pair to log in to a remote system with SSH using PuTTY. PuTTY is an SSH client that is available for Windows and Linux (although it is more common on Windows systems). Using key-based SSH logins, you can disable the normal username/password login procedure which means that only people with a valid private/public key pair can log in. That way, there is no way for brute-force attacks to be successful, so your system is more secure.

DomainKeys is an anti-spam software application in development at Yahoo that uses a form of public key cryptography to authenticate the sender's domain. dkfilter is an SMTP-proxy designed for Postfix. It implements DomainKeys message signing and verification. It comprises two separate filters, an outbound filter for signing outgoing email on port 587, and an inbound filter for verifying signatures of incoming email on port 25. This document shows step-by-step how to install dkfilter for Postfix to deploy DomainKeys signing and verification.

Although Ubuntu comes with lots of applications that can be installed on your desktop, there are still some applications that are available only from third-party repositories. Finding all these repositories and installing these applications manually is very time-consuming, but fortunately some people have created a script called Automatix2 (which is the successor to Automatix) which automates the task for you. It comes with a graphical interface so that you can run it from your desktop, and this tutorial describes how you do it.

Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on SuSE systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there.