Finally, after 6 years of using Linux, found a satisfying theme pack: Elegant Gnome Pack
The only problem that I have with it is the gray icons that look very much the same - a bit confusing. Otherwise, been using it for about a month now - absolutely great, easy on the eyes, very elegant. 2 thumbs up!
Hey,
So as you ALL know - Ubuntu 9.10 is out. Also, as you ALL know - Win7 is out. Actually, so is Snow Leopard, but I’m not an apple fanboy, so I don’t care much about that.
If you google any of these 2 words (win7 and ubuntu), you’ll find 7 billion posts telling you about all the new features, bug fixes, comparisons between the previous versions and of course, the most popular topic is the comparison between these two OS’s. And the most obnoxious eternal question is “Will this Ubuntu version be the windows killer?”
And since I’m being asked about this topic once every few days myself, I decided to post my personal opinion on this. Don’t expect it to be too objective, cuz I’m obviously a Linux fan. But don’t expect me to defend it no matter what, too.
First of all, if you’ve read my previous posts, you’d know that I’m using Linux Mint 7, based on Ubuntu 9.04. Plus, I run win7 in VirtualBox. I should also tell you that I only tried Ubuntu 9.10 for 15 minutes running in VMWare server on WinXP at work, so I don’t have much to say about this particular version. I’m waiting for Mint 8, since I like its polishing better than original Ubuntu’s.
So I’ll rather express my opinion regarding the general Linux vs. Windows issue than Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Win7.
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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.
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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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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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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Man, it’s been 2.5 months since I last posted here. I guess it’s about time now.
Well, I actually wanted to wait a bit with this one, but then I realized that it’s now or never, so here it is.
Linux Mint 6 Community Edition, which is KDE4.2 based was released last week. Something I’ve been waiting for for quite some time now. So I decided to post a few thoughts(like everyone else on the net this year, right?) and tell you about few tricks I had to do.
I’ve been a Linux Mint user for a couple of years now, on and off. Finally settling on a CE version, mostly because it combines the best of both worlds - Gnome and KDE, while being based on KDE itself. For those who don’t know and are too lazy to look it up - Mint is an Ubuntu based distro, but is a bit more polished and includes all the necessary codecs and such. More user friendly I guess. But while so, like every other distribution it still needs a bit of tweaking. Why? Well, because this is the purpose of Linux - you make of it whatever it is you think it should be.
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 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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