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This guide explains how you can set up an iSCSI target and an iSCSI initiator (client), both running Debian Lenny. The iSCSI protocol is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows iSCSI initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) iSCSI target using normal ethernet cabling. To the iSCSI initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

Firewall Builder GUI has a built-in revision control system that can be used to keep track of changes in the objects and policy rules. If data file has been added to the revision control system, every time it is saved, the system asks the user to enter a comment that describes changes done in the file in this session and stores it along with the data. The program also assigns new revision number to the data file using standard software versioning system whith major and minor version numbers separated by a dot. When you open this data file next time, the program presents a list of revisions alongside with dates and comments, letting you choose which revision you want to use. You can open the latest revision and continue working with the file from the point where you left off last time, or open one of the older revisions to inspect how the configuration looked like in the past and possibly create a branch in the revision control system. Here we take a closer look at the built-in revision control system.

Unlike virt-manager, virt-install is a command line tool that allows you to create KVM guests on a headless server. You may ask yourself: "But I can use vmbuilder to do this, why do I need virt-install?" The difference between virt-install and vmbuilder is that vmbuilder is for creating Ubuntu-based guests, whereas virt-install lets you install all kinds of operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and distributions in a guest, just like virt-manager. This article shows how you can use it on an Ubuntu 8.10 KVM server.

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 8.10. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

This guide explains how you can set up fully-virtualized guests (HVM) with Xen 3.2 on a Debian Lenny x86_64 host system. HVM stands for HardwareVirtualMachine; to set up such guests, you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V). Hardware virtualization allows you to install unmodified guest systems (in contrast to paravirtualization where the guest kernel needs to be modified); that way you cannot only virtualize OpenSource operating systems like Linux and BSD, but also closed-source operating systems like Windows where you cannot modify the kernel.

In this tutorial I will show you how to install GlusterFS in a scalable way to create a storage cluster, starting with 2 servers on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. Files will be replicated and splitted accross all servers which is some sort of RAID 10 (raid 1 with < 4 servers). With 4 servers that have each 100GB hard drive, total storage will be 200GB and if one server fails, the data will still be intact and files on the failed server will be replicated on another working server. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 server with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

Ethernet bonding refers to aggregating multiple ethernet channels together to form a single channel. This is primarily used for redundancy in ethernet paths or for load balancing. This page refers in particular to performing ethernet bonding under Linux, and so does not limit itself to discussion of 802.3ad Trunk Aggregation.

Ganeti is a cluster virtualization management system based on Xen. In this tutorial I will explain how to create one virtual Xen machine (called an instance) on a cluster of two physical nodes, and how to manage and failover this instance between the two physical nodes.

The recent release of DRBD 8.3 now includes The Third Node feature as a freely available component. This document will cover the basics of setting up a third node on a standard Debian Etch installation. At the end of this tutorial you will have a DRBD device that can be utilized as a SAN, an iSCSI target, a file server, or a database server.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Lenny server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on an Ubuntu 8.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

This guide presents an introduction to Firewall Builder. Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder) is a GUI firewall configuration and management tool that supports iptables (netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX (FWSM, ASA) and Cisco routers extended access lists. Both professional network administrators and hobbyists managing firewalls with policies more complex that is allowed by simple web based UI can simplify management tasks with the application. The program runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows and Mac OS X and can manage both local and remote firewalls.

This tutorial shows how you can install Xen 3.3 on an Ubuntu 8.10 host (dom0). Xen 3.3 is available from the Ubuntu 8.10 repositories, but the Ubuntu 8.10 kernels (2.6.27-x) are domU kernels, i.e., they work for Xen guests (domU), but not for the host (dom0). Therefore we need to build our own dom0 kernel. This guide explains how to do this with a 2.6.27 kernel.

This article shows how you can watch your hard drive activity with iotop on Ubuntu 8.10 and Debian Lenny. iotop watches I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes or threads on the system. iotop displays columns for the I/O bandwidth read and written by each process/thread during the sampling period. It also displays the percentage of time the thread/process spent while swapping in and while waiting on I/O. In addition the total I/O bandwidth read and written during the sampling period is displayed at the top of the interface.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Debian Lenny desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

This article shows how you can upgrade a system running Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. It is intended for both server and desktop systems.

This tutorial shows how to set up a Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Elgg is an open-source web application written in PHP that allows you to run a social-networking site. This tutorial shows how you can install Elgg on a server running ISPconfig 3.

Proxmox VE (virtual environment) is a distribution based on Debian Etch (x86_64); it provides an OpenSource virtualization platform for running virtual machines (OpenVZ and KVM) and comes with a powerful, web-based control panel (it includes a web-based graphical console that you can use to connect to the virtual machines). With Proxmox VE, you can even create a cluster of virtualization hosts and create/control virtual machines on remote hosts from the control panel. Proxmox VE also supports live migration of virtual machines from one host to the other. This guide shows how you can use Proxmox VE to control KVM and OpenVZ virtual machines and how to create a small computing cloud with it.