For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.
Category: Linux Software
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Instlux – install linux without rebooting to a cd
A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it’s a windows installer style download that can bootstrap and install a linux distribution (looks like Linkat, OpenSuse and Ubuntu are currently supported.) I’m curious to actually try this out in the near future as it looks inteesting (you can choose either cd or network based installs).
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Opengroupware install on Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake
One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu does not have apache in the enabled repositories. (Apache2)… following the intsructions given I first added opengroupware’s (debian sarge) repository (more…)
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Vmware server install on Ubuntu Dapper
I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….
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Daylight Savings Changes on linux systems
Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not… here’s how to do it. wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz’ – then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz……. then…
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Virtual Server on Apache to listen on an alternate port
In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate port 85). The problem was that I wanted different content at each port. Port 85 was to be an .htaccess redirect for another domain (with some port forwarding magic at the firewall.) Port 80 was to remain an internal intranet page. So…. this was all done with vhosts (virtual hosts.)
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Zeroshell Livecd – providing main network services
http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ is an interesting bundle of linux designed to be an out of the box network service swiss army knife of sorts. Here are the network services that it provides…. Kerberos 5 authentication, LDAP, NIS, Radius authentication, x509 certificate authority, unix and windows compatible active directory services, router, implements bridging and vlan protocols, full radius server, captive portal capability, firewall, QoS management, multizone dns server, dhcp server (capable of managing multiple subnets), ntp server, dyndns client, ppoe client, syslog server, lan to lan vpn…..
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Sleuthkit – windows and linux file recovery
http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit… is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it’s something that would be done when you’ve had a suspected rootkit on the system and you boot to another operating system with sluethkit installed (maybe livecd/etc.) and want to try to analyze and hunt for traces of the rootkit. However you do have some similar procedures for forensic analysis that you would for the “I accidentally deleted a file” syndrome… For both situations you DON’T want to be running the live filesystem that’s affected.
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Big Ubuntu Linux news
This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?
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Caching downloaded deb files with apt-cacher
It seems silly with multiple machines to download the same file multiple times. At some level it’s not THAT inconvenient. It really depends on your connection speed and the size of the files in question. For Ubuntu and other systems based on the .deb package format and apt-get there is a nice option for setting up proxy’ing to allow a single download of deb files for install on multiple machines. That option is called apt-cacher. There’s a good wrietup here on the setup of this cache -ing software.