Aug 312012
 

A name server is a server that hosts a network service for providing responses to queries against a directory service. It maps a human-recognizable identifier to a system-internal, identification or addressing component, the program BIND is the most famous name server available on Linux, it can be used to do everything you need from a name server, but sometimes you need less.

Maybe you have a VPS and you want just to manage your DNS name, for this use you could check NSD a great alternative to BIND, it does not do DNS forwarding, it only serves its own domains. but this could be enough for your project.

NSD uses BIND-style zone-files; zone-files used under BIND (named) can usually be supplied unmodified in NSD once declared in the nsd.conf configuration. NSD manages zone information compiled via ‘zonec’ into a binary database file (nsd.db) which allows lightning fast start up of the NSD name-service daemon, syntax structural verification and flagging of errors at database compile-time. All this before being made available to NSD service itself.

Let’s see how to install and configure it.

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Aug 262012
 

This is a genre I like and usually I play this kind of games in their flash/java online version but there are some nice Tower Defense games that can be downloaded and installed on Linux systems, today I’ll present you 3 of my favorites: Creeptd, Target Defense and Revenge of the Titans

But first a small introduction to what’s a Tower defense game:

The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass. Enemies and towers usually have varied abilities, costs, and ability costs. When an enemy is defeated, the player earns money or points, which are used to buy or upgrade towers, or upgrade the number of money or points that are earned, or even upgrade the rate at which they upgrade.

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Aug 212012
 

This is an article of mine, first published on Wazi

Every organization must monitor its infrastructure’s uptime and performance. While the popular Nagios application is a good general-purpose monitoring program that you can extend with plugins to handle just about any task, you may do even better by employing Cacti as a graphical front end to RRDTool‘s data logging and graphing functionality. Cacti was developed specifically to monitor and collect performance information, while Nagios is more oriented toward state changes, such as noting whether a daemon is up or down.

RRDTool stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. Cacti provides templates to gather and show information such as system load (CPU, RAM, disks), users connected, MySQL load, and Apache load, all of which can affect the performance of your site.

Cacti’s front end is completely PHP-driven. It supports data gathering via different methods such as scripts in any language and SNMP.

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Aug 182012
 

In the past I’ve published articles on how to do a benchmark with namebench to see what’s the fastest DNS server for you and how to crypt your DNS traffic if you use Opendns but I’ve never done a comprehensive guide of the command dig, probably the best command you can have on the command line to query a DNS server, so today I want to show you the basic usage of this command and some trick, using examples that you can re-use for your goals.

But as first thing, probably every reader know what’s a DNS server, but anyway it’s better to take the good definition from Wikipedia:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. A Domain Name Service resolves queries for these names into IP addresses for the purpose of locating computer services and devices worldwide.

So let’s see how we can query a DNS server o get all the info we need.

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Aug 142012
 

Around 2 years ago I started this project, and I’m happy to see that all my work has given some good results.

I’ve received many articles by contributors and a lot of help in the corrections of the articles, I’ve published some of the things I’ve learned in my years as system administrator and installed and tested new softwares that probably I would not have seen otherwise.

It’s been an interesting journey so far and as first thing i must thank all the people that have helped with the website, but also all the readers that have left a comment, sent an email or just visited the website, THANKS !

And now, some statistical number, some curiosity and the most viewed articles for these 2 years.
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