Tag-Archive for ◊ server ◊

Some more Openfiler
Thursday, May 30th, 2013 | Author: Ozzik

Heeeey….
It’s been almost two years since I wrote the last time. I guess I had nothing to say until now;)
No, that’s not true, just didn’t have the time or the energy.
But the last couple of days pushed me towards posting some more about Openfiler.

This project is quite controversial. On one hand, it’s good. It combines most of the features, stability and quality you want for the storage without paying a cent.
On the other hand, the dev team is odd. To say the least. Their thing is that they don’t talk to the users. They used to, but they don’t anymore.
They had promissed to release the version 3.0 about 3 years ago, since then they keep it silent.
Now, I totally understand the “it’ll be released when it’s ready” attitude, a lot of open source (and only) projects do that. But at least talk to your community, tell them approximately what’s going on, something.
A lot of people just said goodbye to the project because of this. But it doesn’t seem to effect the principle - to disregard the community.

Anyway, personally, when choosing the storage for the mid-size company I’m still choosing the OF, because I know it pretty well, it proved to be stable enough and it has all the features a company may need.
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IIS: dealing with 2 IPs
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
I had a problem today, when I had to assign 1 particular IP to a website on IIS 6, Windows 2003 SP2. The server itself had 2 addresses. On this website 1 of the IPs worked, the other one gave errors like “the network location cannot be reached” and wouldn’t let start the website.

The solution consists of 2 steps:
1. Open regedit and go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA, then add a new DWORD named DisableLoopBackCheck with value 1.
2. In Win2003 you already have that and in WinXP you have to install it additionally - support tools. Go to start-programs-support tools-cmd (not the regular cmd), alternatively you can just add the path to the system environment.
The tool you need is called httpcfg.exe and this is how you use it in this scenario:

httpcfg query iplisten

this gives you the current IPs IIS is listening to.

httpcfg set iplisten -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

this adds the IP (instead of the x’s of course)
3. The secret step - reboot the server. A lot of people had problems before they realized they MUST reboot first.

Good luck!

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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