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How To Harden PHP5 With Suhosin On CentOS 5.4

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:12:35 +0100

How To Harden PHP5 With Suhosin On CentOS 5.4

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on a CentOS 5.4 server. From the Suhosin project page: "Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections."

VBoxHeadless - Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 3.1.x On A Headless Fedora 12 Server

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:47:21 +0100

VBoxHeadless - Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 3.1.x On A Headless Fedora 12 Server

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless Fedora 12 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

Wireshark Remote Capturing

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:55:38 +0100

Wireshark Remote Capturing

This short tutorial is without screenshots but a slightly more advanced usecase of Wireshark, namely doing the capture on one box and visualize the captured data in realtime on another box.

Virtual Hosting With vsftpd And MySQL On Debian Lenny

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:34:10 +0100

Virtual Hosting With vsftpd And MySQL On Debian Lenny

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. Usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. This document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine.

Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:34:50 +0100

Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

How To Set Up WebDAV With Lighttpd On Ubuntu 9.10

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:25:43 +0100

How To Set Up WebDAV With Lighttpd On Ubuntu 9.10

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with lighttpd on an Ubuntu 9.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the lighttpd server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Build Your Own Video Community With Lighttpd And FlowPlayer (Debian Lenny)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:59:10 +0100

Build Your Own Video Community With Lighttpd And FlowPlayer (Debian Lenny)

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Debian Lenny. I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

How To Set Up WebDAV With Lighttpd On OpenSUSE 11.2

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:57:28 +0100

How To Set Up WebDAV With Lighttpd On OpenSUSE 11.2

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.2 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the lighttpd server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:10:23 +0100

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:41:18 +0100

Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) to one large storage server (distributed storage) with GlusterFS. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Using WebDAV With ISPConfig 3 On Ubuntu 9.10

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:58:19 +0100

Using WebDAV With ISPConfig 3 On Ubuntu 9.10

This guide explains how to set up and use WebDAV on a web site created with ISPConfig 3 on an Ubuntu 9.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Fully Utilizing Your X-Core CPU

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:43:26 +0100

Fully Utilizing Your X-Core CPU

Almost all systems sold nowadays have at least a dual-core CPU, even triple- or quad-cores are getting cheaper and getting standard in the near future. But how to utilize your shiny x-core to it's full potential, with applications that are only utilizing one core ? With Linux, which has strong multitasking capabilities as all unixoid operating systems, there is an easy possibility to parallelize tasks which are normally only using one core of an x-core CPU.

High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS On Fedora 12 - Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:52:03 +0100

High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS On Fedora 12 - Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Fedora 12) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Changing From SquirrelMail To RoundCube On Your ISPConfig3 Server

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:58:04 +0100

Changing From SquirrelMail To RoundCube On Your ISPConfig3 Server

This tutorial has been created for those who have installed The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.4 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3] and do not like SquirrelMail as webmail client. Here’s a guide to replace SquirrelMail with RoundCube, which is more visually attractive and easier to manage for our clients.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Lenny

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:20:18 +0100

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Lenny

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Lenny server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.