Mar 042013
 

Proxmox Ve is an Open Source project developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Austria under the auspices of the Internet foundation of Austria (IPA) and it’s released under the GNU General public license 3. It is a solution based on Debian 6 Squeeze at 64 bit, which duly “customized”, allows to create a virtualization environment of type “bare metal” based on OpenVZ and KVM technologies.

Proxmox Virtual Environment, today announced the release of version 2.3. The version brings new compelling features like KVM live backup technology as well as the integration of the Ceph RBD (RADOS Block Device) as storage plugin.
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Mar 032013
 

Many NAT firewalls or VPN server time out idle sessions after a certain period of time to keep their trunks clean. Sometimes the interval between session drops is 24 hours, but on many commodity firewalls, connections are killed after as little as 300 seconds, and this can be a problem if you are working on a remote machine and suddenly you find yourself logged out with a message “Connection reset by peer”.

In a former article I’ve presented autossh, a solution that comes to your help when you want to be sure that a SSH connection stay always on between 2 machines. Autossh is a simple program that allows you to run an instance of ssh, keep it under control, and restart the same instance once that the connection is dropped up to a maximum number of times controlled by an environment variable.

This is useful if you need to have a “permanent” connection between 2 machines, but perhaps you just need to have a connection between your personal computer and different servers, and in these cases autossh is less useful, so let’s see how to use some openssh options to keep our connection open.
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Mar 022013
 

Postfix it’s a great mailserver, but it’s not the easiest of the beast to tame if you aren’t an expert system administrator and just want to setup a mail service for your server and domain, so today I’ll show you how to install and configure PostfixAdmin a web based interface used to manage mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases. It also features support for vacation/out-of-the-office messages.

This software is compatible with different databases and IMAP/POP3 server, in the following article I’ll use Mysql as database server, on a Centos 6 Linux server.

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Feb 252013
 

In the past I’ve tested ownCloud a good solution for hosting a personal solution of cloud storage for your files, or perhaps your team, but there is also an interesting alternative: Seafile another open source file synchronization tool, it comes with Dropbox-like file syncing, but is designed to be better suited to teamwork with some of the features that are oriented to this such as:

1) Users can create and join groups, then share files to the group. This makes it convenient for teamwork.
2) Files are organized into libraries, each be selectively synced to your computer. Libraries can be synced with any local folders.
3) Online file collaboration features, such as PDF and Office file preview and file commenting.

You can build a file sharing and syncing service for your team on your servers with ease.
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Feb 232013
 

On any server it’s important to have the most information as possible on what’s going on in real time with tools as pidstat and glances, but it’s also important to collect all the activity done by all the users and processes that are running, to analyze them at a later time or in case of problems of any kind (performance, security, capacity).

psaact as well as acct are both open source application that are used for monitoring user activity on a system. They run in the background keeping track of user activity on a system and the resources consumed by services such as MySQL, Apache, FTP, SSH, et al.

Now with these applications one will be able to track not only user activity, but that of all administrators as well that is performed on a particular server. Consequently, you can make use of this program to know what your users are doing at any given point in time and know what commands they are using as well as be aware of how long it is they are spending on a server.
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