Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

Free X server for Windows

Monday, June 16th, 2008

I recently found XMing, a free X server for Windows, providing a useful alternative to VNC for accessing remote Ubuntu desktops. Instructions here.

Preserving UTF-8 filenames from Windows to Linux

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

On occasion I access (Ubuntu) Linux servers from Windows using Putty and WinSCP. In order to preserve UTF-8 filenames, some snakeoil is required. (more…)

Setting up SCP/SFTP chroot access to Ubuntu/x64 server

Monday, February 4th, 2008

scponly provides a mechanism to enable secure file-access to a server, with marked improvement over FTP.

scponly can be setup in a) normal mode, whereby the user can see the whole of the file-system of the server, or b) in chroot’ed mode, whereby the user only sees the files the server administrator has granted access to. The latter is what I wanted, but there are a few extra steps required for 64-bit kernel servers. (more…)

Dell shipping PCs with Linux

Monday, October 8th, 2007

I spotted on Ubuntu’s news-section that Dell finally have commenced shipping products (1 desktop, 1 notebook) with Ubuntu. Available in UK, Germany and France. Excellent!

Feisty (2.6.20-16-generic kernel) boot failure

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

In applying the latest Feisty Fawn updates to one of my laptops I ran into a problem with the bootup hanging shortly after starting. The usual snakeoil of ‘acpi=off pci=noacpi’ appended to the boot command line failed to make any difference.

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Cluster monitoring and control

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

I recently setup a cluster of Linux compute servers, and found myself looking for instrumentation to monitor & control the servers. The following open-source packages give excellent insight and access to the state of the cluster:

Useful Linux sysadm articles

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Linux-mag has a very useful set of ‘guru’ articles for newly-hatched sysadm’s.

Linux file-systems

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

I am happiest with the overall compromises and performance of XFS for my data, used in combination with ext3 on the /boot and root partitions. The XFS partitions hold either /var or /home (or both), depending on what purpose the system is put to. In my setups, /home is irrelevant for server-only systems, /var is where Postfix, MySQL etc will do I/O.

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Email virtual domain hosting using Postfix, MySQL and PHP

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

My present SMTP/IMAP setup uses a combination of flat-file configuration with MySQL user parameters. I recently found a web-based domain administration tool; Postfix.Admin. With this tool, you get 3 levels of management abstraction: server, domain and user.

Reference:

Bluetooth on an OpenWrt router

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I run OpenWrt on my Asus WL-500gx router, which is my principal defense against the Internet wilderness.

In addition to the main OpenWRT site, MacSat’s site contains useful information on configuration. (more…)