Author Archive

Got security? TrueCrypt allows you to create and use encrypted volumes and reduce the risk to your sensitive data.

Trip up spammers with greylist-milter, a method of temporarily rejecting questionable email.

Using Amanda allows you quickly and easily implement a robust Open Source backup solution to almost any device, or even multiple devices simultaneously.

Monitor and trend the machines in your network the quick and easy way.

Get a grip on the next-gen Oracle Cluster File System, an alternative to GFS.

In the market for a high performance HTTP server and reverse proxy server? Take a look at “Engine X.”

As soon as you have more than one system to manage, it’s time to start thinking about configuration and system management. Cfengine can take the complexity out of systems management.

Does your web app need a bit of a performance boost? Introducing Varnish, the high-performance HTTP accelerator.

If you’ve administered any remote Linux machines then you are already familiar with SSH, but you might not know that you can use SSH for much more than just connecting to a shell on a remote system. By using SSH’s port forwarding features, you can set up encrypted tunnels for many services, or connect to systems behind a firewall from home.

Linux Magazine’s Jeremy Garcia shows you how to take command of MySQL using MySQL Proxy, a lightweight application that sits between MySQL server and client applications. Using MySQL Proxy, you can set up load balancing, dynamic fail over, query analysis, query filtering, query modification, and more.

Jeremy Garcia provides a short introduction to F-Spot, a handy personal photo management application written in Mono.

Get to know this reverse proxy load balancer for web traffic with SSL support.

This article shows you how to turn a desktop Linux machine into a UPnP Media Server.

Discover dsh, a utility to run arbitrary commands on any number of remote machines.

Even a rudimentary repository system is better than none. Learn how to create local and remote filesystem snapshots with rsnapshot.

This article introduces you to a few lesser known X utilities.

Learn how to deploy Apache’s mod_evasive module to help reduce the impact of denial of service attacks.

Learn how to use Amazon’s "i">S3 to quickly, easily, and cheaply perform off-site
backups.

This article introduces you to the "i">MySQL Query Browser, a visual tool for creating,
executing, and optimizing SQL queries.

Pick up a few pointers on optimizing your MySQL install.

HTTP load balancing and Web serving on a budget with Perlbal.

Introducing MySQL Administrator, a graphical user interface database administration tool from MySQL AB, the makers of MySQL.

Learn how to tune and extend SpamAssassin to catch more spam.

Designed for enterprises and service providers that need to collect time-series SNMP data from a large number of targets, RTG is a flexible, scalable, high-performance SNMP statistics monitoring system.

This article shows you how to configure and compile PHP for maximum performance.

Want to you stay in touch with family and friends? Two Linux applications can help you keep the lines of communication open.

Learn how to install and configure the Alternative PHP Cache

Learn how to install and configure the Alternative PHP Cache

Learn how to install and configure memcached, an object caching system, to improve the performance of your PHP applications.

Discover how to use bashpodder as a podcatching client.

HTML Tidy cleans and pretty prints your HTML.

Learn how to manage your iPod with gtkpod and Linux.

Learn how to use lsof to see what files are open on your system.

What’s better than Firefox? Firefox with extensions!

What’s better than Firefox? Firefox with extensions!

Learn how to setup a Linux cluster without touching the machines’ installed operating system.

Discover how to check out the latest development tree of your favorite projects using CVS or Subversion.

Discover how to check out the latest development tree of your favorite projects using CVS or Subversion.

Learn how to install and set up Rootkit Hunter, a utility to stalk rootkits.

Learn how to install and setup ifplugd, a utility that configures and reconfigures your network as an Ethernet cable is connected and disconnected.

HTML Tidy cleans and pretty prints your HTML.

Network tunneling can be helpful and even necessary, but it can also be used to circumvent security policies. Here’s a survey of the best tunneling tools available and a list of techniques that may help you detect active tunnels.

Diagnose and resolve I/O bottlenecks using iostat

Squid is often used as a reverse proxy to spare web servers from repeated requests for the same content. But Squid can also be used to spare you from interminable delays when requesting content. Deployed as a local caching proxy, Squid can reduce your site’s bandwidth consumption and make browsing more responsive. Learn how it works, and start saving time and money today.

Learn how to use ccache and distcc to speed up compilation.

Let’s face it, even rsync and tar is better than nothing.

Do you administer multiple distributions and find it frustrating that you can find packages for some distros and not others? Have you ever tried looking for a .rpm only to find a .deb (or vice versa)? Sometimes, Linux can be maddening.

Last month’s “Tech Support” showed how to monitor resource utilization with Cacti. This month, let’s use vmstat to track down any bottlenecks that Cacti might have found. Part of the procps package (which contains many other useful utilities such as ps, top, w, and kill), vmstat reports statistical information about process status, memory consumption, paging activity, block I/O operations, interrupts, context switches, and processor usage. vmstat is available from http://procps.sourceforge.net and is licensed under the GPL. While you can download and install the latest version of procps, it’s a standard set of utilities found in almost every Linux install.

When using Linux in a business environment, it’s important to monitor resource utilization. System monitoring helps with capacity planning, alerts you to performance problems, and generally makes managers happy.

If you’ve administered any remote Linux machines, then you’re probably already familiar with SSH. As you may know, SSH provides secure, encrypted network communication. Utilities like ssh and sftp, which are based on SSH, protect remote login sessions and file transfers, respectively, and have largely subsumed similar but insecure and unencrypted utilities such as ftp, rlogin, rsh, rcp, and telnet. (In fact, if any of your systems still use telnet, put down this magazine at once, go disable telnet, install and enable SSH, and then continue reading.)

The two previous editions of “Tech Support” introduced software to help you monitor the security of your Linux system. March’s column showed you how to monitor filesystem changes with Tripwire, and last month’s column explained how to detect rootkits and loadable kernel modules (LKMs) with chkrootkit. This month, let’s see how to monitor and analyze your system logs with Logwatch.

Last month’s “Tech Support” showed you how to monitor filesystem changes with Tripwire, a handy system utility that alerts you to all filesystem changes. Like SNORT and others, Tripwire’s just one of many practical security measures that minds your system 24/7.

As several recent high profile compromises have reminded us, Linux isn’t immune to security vulnerabilities. While you should always do everything you can to secure your Linux systems, you can also put measures in place to quickly detect a break-in. One useful “alarm” system is Tripwire.

This month’s column provides a suite of helpful utilities that save time and energy and avoid frustration.

I often see questions from people trying to install IEEE 1394 — more commonly known as Firewire — devices in Linux. Some newer distributions support FireWire “out of the box,” but not all FireWire hardware is compatible with Linux. This month’s column answers some burning questions about FireWire.

Not too long ago, email was a wonderful thing. It provided a fast and easy method to communicate with family, friends, and co-workers, regardless of timezone or location. Unfortunately, due to spam and viruses, many people now find email almost unusable. In this month’s Tech Support, let’s take back that inbox.