Archive for the Category ◊ Admin's scene ◊

Windows 2008 on IBM x335 - no-go!
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
well, here’s one for you:
I had to set up a server last week. It had to be win2008 on an IBM x335. Now, most of you will just say: so? Let me tell you. The chances you can get it to work are pretty much 50/50. In my case it was a big fat 0.

There are two things you’ll be struck by: optical drive and SCSI controller. The first one was not that much of a problem for me, but it sure can be for you. You see, the Redmond guys decided that in 2008 (and later) there’s no chance you have a CD-ROM drive in you server. Because all new servers come with DVD now. Which is true. But what about the older ones? As far as M$ is concerned: it’s your problem - deal with it. The only format win2008 comes in is DVD.
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M$ 7 and VirtualBox
Sunday, October 04th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Forgot to tell you. I have the need to run the M$ OS at home for work purposes sometimes, so I used to have the XP on VMWare server 2.0, and it was sooo annoying, especially the slow awakening. I tried the VirtualBox once in the past and it didn’t have the bridged networking out of the box, so I blew it off.

But now I decided to give it another shot. Plus they finally added the bridged network. And since I had to do the fresh install anyway, I decided to give the M$ 7 a shot. Well, I can sum up with this: I’m really happy with the speed - it simply flies. The so called OS from Redmond still sucks. It’s the same crappy thing that gave them the “great” reviews last year, but a bit faster. I’m using the final release from July or something.

So before you run buying this piece of shit with a brand new PC or a laptop - think twice. It’s the same, just a bit faster than the previous one. Why am I not returning to XP? Because clearly they decided to move in this direction (look at win 2008 server - it’s pure vista) and I gotta keep up.

Ozzik.

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Category: Admin's scene, Linux at home  | Tags:  | Leave a Comment
What to expect
Sunday, October 04th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hi,
Everyday I tell myself I have to post something, but it’s kinda hard to write after a long day at work, and I’m trying not to think about computers on weekends.
Anyway, till I do post, here’s some stuff that was released lately and some to be released very soon:

pfSense 1.2.3 is supposed to come out sometimes in October I think, but then again the guys are not in hurry with release cycles, they believe it should be released when it’s ready.
pfSense: The Definitive Guide - a book by Chris Buechler and Jim Pingle is about to hit the stores any day now.

Ubuntu 9.10 will be released October 29th. The beta testers say it will boot in 10 seconds.
Amarok 2.2 is already out and is believed to be pretty good - they’re catching up with all the functionality from 1.4.

I’m really looking forward for the 0.7 release of FreeNAS. Meanwhile there’s only an RC1. So hopefully it’ll happen real soon.
Untangle 7 is out, and while I never really used the distro myself, it’s supposed to be really good - at least the functionality list is pretty hot. Although I wouldn’t use it as a firewall, I would put it behind pfSense for every other task.
Warning: it’s not completely free - they’re licensing the multiwan and some other add-ons.

Some other great news arrived last month from Clear Foundation. It appears, they bought the ClarkConnect distro and in a couple of days will be offering it for free - even the former commercial add-ons - and they’re open-sourcing the whole thing. I actually used this distribution at home for about a year (until I found pfSense and FreeNAS) and was pretty happy with it. But when I installed it at work as a secondary gateway for the office, I faced some problems with the connection to my ISP. We bought the 1 year license of the office version or something. So I turned to the level 1 support and after some mailings the guy told me to look for some other distro as they can’t help me. I was pretty upset about that kind of treatment and like I said I did find another distro, which I’m recommending to everyone ever since - pfSense and FreeNAS. But now that it’s gonna be open source, including the multi-wan, it could be the time to test it again - for some other purposes.

I guess that’s about it.
See ya,

Ozzik.

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The server every admin needs, part 3
Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

So here we go, we have Xymon, Ntop and Plone already installed.
We’re left with Splunk, syslog-ng and a small surprise afterwords.

Splunk is not really an open source software, but it’s definitely the best there is so far. It is free though, I mean, if you have less than 500MB of indexed data a day. Some will say it’s way more than they need, but then again some will say they have 10 times more than that on a least busiest day.
I do know that if you want to get a license - it will cost a lot of money. I think they even removed the prices from their website - not to scare people off:) To download the software you’ll have to register - no big deal.

Download it from here. Note, this line when you choose your version: 2.4+ kernel Linux distributions with NPTL / x86 2.6+ kernel Linux distributions / x86.
It’s not very clear, but if you need x86 - this is the one you want, don’t be fooled by the 2.4 kernel at the beginning of the line. I was - downloaded the 64bit version instead and set for 15 minutes trying to figure out why it’s not working.
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The server every admin needs, part 2
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

So, what’s next?
Let’s spend some time with the easier things.

Ntop. This one’s installed right from the standard repository (we already did so in the previous post).
The big question is why do you need it, right? Well, it’s a great tool that you can use for all kinds of purposes, but personally, I use it to monitor the Internet activity, or traffic loads to be exact.
The idea is very simple. If you have a setup like this: modem–>router–>firewall–>switch–>LANs, and you feel that the Internet is very slow, you just know that someone’s downloading something from the rapidshare.com or maybe even a new MS small DVD image of 3GB, how do you know who’s the asshole?
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The server every admin needs
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hi,

Over the years working in IT I came to a conclusion every admin comes to - you have to have a server that does all the things that sometimes you underestimate the importance of.  Those would be logging, monitoring, documenting, analyzing. If you’re not new to this field - you’ll sure know what I’m talking about, but if you are - this may very well be the guide to your future professional happiness:)

Anyway, there are tons, and I mean tons of software willing to do those tasks, so 9 out of 10 people will jump and say they use a better one. But the ones I’m gonna discuss here are the ones that worked for me for some specific reason, or maybe even without one;)

So what are we building? We’re gonna build a monitoring server that uses Xymon(ex-Hobbit) software, Syslog-ng logging, Ntop network traffic probe, Plone documentation server and Splunk log analyzer.  I also plan to add the Observer for SNMP or otherwise integrate SNMP into Xymon. But that’s later. Just FYI I built this server to serve my own needs about 2 years ago, starting only with Hobbit and adding all the other software according to the needs, but as the new versions of software and OS were released I decided to rebuild the whole thing instead of upgrading. This time I documented the whole thing too. So let’s get to it.
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Squid setup and configuration for a high-load environment
Sunday, February 01st, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hello again,
I know I don’t write much, but that’s just my lack of time. But hey, I’m trying. Anyway, today I wanna tell you about setting up a squid server for a high-load environment (hey, just like the title suggests :) ) First, a little background.
squid
Squid a caching proxy server which can be configured to work in different environments. It can be a forwarding proxy, an internet transparent gateway for access control purposes and my favorite - a reverse proxy, i.e. website accelerator.

I won’t tell you much regarding the first two(serving the same purpose, really), as I never really had to deal with those kind of environments. And even if I’d decide to, AFAIK there is a problem working in a multi-WAN configuration, which is exactly what I need. But I did study a lot regarding the third option - a website accelerator.

Not to say that I’ve found the perfect configuration, but for our purposes it seems pretty decent. A very big problem with squid is that it has very few guides on the net. It does have a configuration guide on its website and some FAQ and other stuff, but I guess what is really needed is some examples of a known configuration working in a high-load environment. Surprisingly, a lot of people asking about this kind of things, use very weak hardware, like PIII servers and such. And while I understand that it serves their needs pretty well, that doesn’t help me to understand the real abilities and limitations of this software. What is even less helping is that the developers themselves don’t know those things - not to blame them in any way, because, as they say, every setup is pretty unique and there’s no real way to know this without trying out different options.
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Backup via rsync
Monday, January 05th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hi again,
after a long New Year’s break, I’m back to deliver the promised procedure of backup via rsync when working with Openfiler.
In the previous post I described the hardware situation in our company, so it should be clear by now that I have two Openfiler machines: one in production, and another one in standby.
Before I get into the details, I wanna tell you about some things you may want to consider.

The Openfiler is actually able to do the DRDB, which is a High Availability setup, when the production machine is replicated online to the backup one. Each of them has an IP, plus they have another virtual IP that they pass on to each other in case of failure. The users (and the DNS) actually work with this VIP. So any failure is actually transparent to everybody. It’s a standard HA setup. The only thing I asked myself is what happens if you accidentally delete a file? If it’s going to be replicated immediately to the other machine - what’s the point of having a backup? Actually, I believe I’m not the only one who’s asked that question, so it’s very possible that there are answers and solutions to that, but somehow I decided not to try so hard, especially that we decided that it would be ok to have a backup once a day. YMMV if you need to do it more often. When that was out of the way, it was clear I should go with rsync.
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Category: Admin's scene  | Tags: , , , ,  | 2 Comments
Storage servers
Thursday, December 25th, 2008 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
so before I tell you all about backing up the openfiler via rsync, I thought I should tell you about how we dealt with the servers themselves, the storages that is.
Just so you understand - I prefer white boxes over brands. Storage-wise anyway.
Why? I’ll explain.
I had to deal with purchasing the storages this past couple of months, so I talked to a lot of dealers.
Man, did they piss me off! You see, they don’t offer to sell you hardware anymore, they offer a solution. Yeah, this new fancy word in the industry. We offer a solution. It’s like they think they invent something so complicated that only they have it, and only they can manage and support it, and eventually you have to pay them like a zillion dollars for something you should call “a solution” and be proud of it.
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Join Openfiler to Active Directory
Saturday, December 13th, 2008 | Author: Ozzik

As promised, the guide for joining of Openfiler to Active Directory.
And a small part of getting in to make a Homedir for every user (not yet tried by me though).
Most of this guide is copied from rossignol’s guide on the forums.
This document was created for use with Openfiler 2.3 final.
Test domain machine is dcnbn.ds. trotfqdn.ab.ca
This document is case sensitive.

Legend:
dcnbn = domain controler’s netbios name
ds = domain short name
trotfqdn.ab.ca = the rest of the fully qualified domain name.ab.ca
ofnbn = openfiler box’s netbios name

Installation guide is pretty good on the openfiler’s homepage
more…

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