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Distrubution release support (CentOS4/Debian 5)
Linux distributions keep moving forwards, and as they progress older releases stop receiving security patches or updates. As part of our commitment to maintaining reliable and safe services, we would like to highlight the following announcements… CentOS-4 End Of Life The CentOS-4 distribution (current version 4.9) will be at End of Life on February 29,…
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Package management using apt-get
Our support team receives a few queries each day about managing packages under Linux. All our installs have the APT toolset installed. We have a guide on some of the basic uses listed on our HowTo page. There are a a number of uses which can make life easier which I will detail below, but…
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Easy web server Load-Balancing with HAProxy
Configuring load balancing between multiple web servers may seem challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. HAProxy is a great lightweight tool that is easy to setup and has a large number of rich features for managing and serving content. Lets look at a simple scenario using two application or web servers n2 and n3,…
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Storage Clustering Part 2: GlusterFS
GlusterFS is an interesting solution for providing redundant network attached storage clusters. Some features include… trivially easy for basic setups supports virtually any file-system no need to mess with kernels can work across commodity network hardware suitable for enterprise deployment has commercial support available GlusterFS can scale well also, its simple configuration based storage is…
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Easy IP failover (Debian squeeze)
Say you have a bunch of servers on a fast private network, running a busy web site. And you need a gateway server so you can reach those from the outside world. You might run a proxy on a gateway server to expose that. However there could be a problem accessing your site if that…
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mod_flvx – flv movies working with apache/apache2
Want to do some streaming of flv on your site? heres how! cd /usr/local/src wget http://people.apache.org/~pquerna/modules/mod_flvx.c apxs -i -a -c mod_flvx.c if apxs does not exist, then apxs2 should. If neither do then install the apache dev packages Debian based distros use apt-get install apache2-prefork-dev The module load will automatically be created for you usually,…
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Debian v6.0 (Squeeze) released
Debian is one of our most popular distros. Being very well suited for servers. Debian 6.0 (aka squeeze) is now released. It is a good option for a stable distro, with a good support life for package updates. And right now it has a great, fresh set of new server-side app versions. Squeeze is available…
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Older versions of debian and updates
We have come across several users who run older versions of debian. This is usually fine, sometimes for some reasons users are unable to update for some time but require a package to be installed. This is where the fun begins…
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Security at home – encrypted home directories
This isn’t directly server related at all, more for the home or office user who wants to make sure things are nice and secure. At the office we like to also make sure our desktops are fairly safe to connect from as well, mostly in case the machines ever get stolen, we know our data…
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Easy Peasy Linux Firewalling – iptables
A lot of our customers have asked for firewalls, and since this is a common theme, i decided that I would help them out. Of course it can be a mission to learn how to make your own and what to do or not do, and some of the pre-made ones can be confusing. So…