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MySQL 5.1 is generally available for production use. One of the key features of MySQL 5.1 is partitioning. This how to shows how to install and configure Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL (ZRM) 2.1 to perform backup and recovery of MySQL partitioned tables.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) 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. Linux Mint 6 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

Linux has a special mount option for file systems called noatime. If this option is set for a file system in /etc/fstab, then reading accesses will no longer cause the atime information (last access time - don't mix this up with the last modified time - if a file is changed, the modification date will still be set) that is associated with a file to be updated (in reverse this means that if noatime is not set, each read access will also result in a write operation). Therefore, using noatime can lead to significant performance gains.

vmbuilder is a tool (introduced on Ubuntu 8.10) that allows you to build virtual machines (with Ubuntu as the OS) for multiple virtualization techniques. Currently it supports Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, and VMware Server. You can afterwards copy the virtual machines to another system (a Xen, KVM, VMware Workstation 6, or VMware Server host) and run them there.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on an Ubuntu 8.10 server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

This article describes how you can shrink and grow existing software RAID partitions. I have tested this with non-LVM RAID1 partitions that use ext3 as the file system. I will describe this procedure for an intact RAID array and also a degraded RAID array.

ubuntu-system-panel is a simple launcher for the GNOME desktop, providing easy access to Places, Applications and common configuration items for your computer. This guide shows how to install and configure it on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.

Previously, talking to Exchange without using Microsoft products was pretty much out of the question. The binary MAPI protocol is proprietary and poorly documented. Exchange supports IMAP and POP, but these protocols only give access to emails, not the calendar, address book, todo lists etc. But beginning with version 2007, Exchange now ships with a SOAP interface called Exchange Web Services, or EWS. This interface gives us access to the functions necessary to write clients in any programming language on any platform. This article describes a PHP program to look up, delete and insert items in an Exchange calendar.

You probably know that reading from RAM is a lot of faster than reading files from the hard drive, and reduces your disk I/O. This article shows how you can store files and directories in memory instead of on the hard drive with the help of tmpfs (a file system for creating memory devices). This is ideal for file caches and other temporary data (such as PHP's session files if you are using session.save_handler = files) because the data is lost when you power down or reboot the system.

For this Howto I use Debian Lenny (still testing and not "stable" for the simple reason as - contrary to Debian Etch and/or Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 - the install routine does setup the initrd correctly so that you can set up encrypted swap and also an encrypted raid1 lvm during install). This Howto will be heavy on screen shots again - a lot of them are repetitive as I set up multiple partitions at once. Basically I will set up the system in a way that (a) everything [except for /boot] will be encrypted, (b) everything will be on a raid1 and (c) have an LVM for your data partition so that this one can be easily expanded.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Debian Etch server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

This short article shows some useful netcat commands. netcat is known as the TCP/IP swiss army knife. From the netcat man page: netcat is a simple unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 10 desktop (GNOME) 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.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your CentOS 5.2 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Vtonf is a free web-based control panel (released under the GPL license) for managing virtual private servers (VPS) based on OpenVZ. It makes it very easy to create and manage OpenVZ VMs even for people with little technical knowledge. Right now, Vtonf is available only for RedHat, Fedora, and CentOS (support for Debian is planned), therefore I describe its installation and usage on a CentOS 5.2 server.

This tutorial shows how to install Cherokee from source with PHP and MySQL support on an Ubuntu 8.10 server machine. The reason for compiling from source instead of using apt to install binary packages is that there are older versions in the repositories than the ones available on Cherokee's homepage. The main goal is to install the webserver so I didn't bother compiling everything else. That way you won't spend to much time on doing things I didn't want to describe.

This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with CloneZilla Live. CloneZilla Live is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are compressed and can be transferred to a Samba-, SSH-, or NFS server or to a local hard drive or USB drive.

In this tutorial, I'm going to be teaching what mod rewrite is and few examples of its uses. Mod rewrite is a powerful tool and one of the simplest ways to make your website more SEO friendly.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 10 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP5/Ruby/Python, Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 2 on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).