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OTRS is a trouble ticket system with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries. This guide is specifically intended to help install and run OTRS.

This tutorial shows how to implement SPF (Sender Policy Framework) in a Postfix 2.x installation. The Sender Policy Framework is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. There are lots of SPF extensions and patches available for Postfix, but most require that you recompile Postfix. Therefore we will install the postfix-policyd-spf-perl package from openspf.org which is a Perl package and can be implemented in existing Postfix installations (no Postfix compilation required).

Auth Shadow or mod-auth-shadow is a module for apache (and apache2, sort of) that enables authentication against /etc/shadow. The benefits being that any system user with a password can be authenticated for web_dav, subversion or simply an https server. The only other way to do this is with PAM. That method is dangerous because the apache user (www-data in my case) must be able to read /etc/shadow. Obviously, not a good idea. Auth Shadow accomplishes this safely by using a intermediate program called validate. This works because validate can be owned by root but executable by everyone. In the event that your server is compromised through apache, your password file will not be readable.

With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the first of a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Fedora Core 6 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all 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, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

This short article describes how you can search for missing packages with apt-file on Debian and Ubuntu systems. apt-file allows you to search for a file name, and it gives back the name(s) of the package(s) containing that file so that you can install the appropriate package.

This tutorial will show you how to set up a serial console on a Linux system, and connect to it via a null modem cable. This is quite useful if your Linux server is in a headless configuration (no keyboard or monitor), as it allows you to easily get a console on the system if there are any problems with it (especially network problems, when SSH is not available). In the end, the GRUB menu will appear over the serial link, as will the bootup messages (output when booting the system). I am using Debian Etch on the server and Ubuntu Edgy on my client, although this should work on any Linux distribution.

This tutorial describes how to set up an audio streaming server with Icecast2. In order that Icecast2 can stream audio to listeners we install Ices2. Ices2 is a program that sends audio data to an Icecast2 server to broadcast to clients. Ices2 can either read audio data from disk (Ogg Vorbis files), or sample live audio from a sound card and encode it on the fly. In this article we will let Ices2 read .ogg files from the local hard disk.

Network Bonding, otherwise known as port trunking allows you to combine multiple network ports into a single group, effectively aggregating the bandwidth of multiple interfaces into a single connection. For example, you can aggregate two gigabyte ports into a two-gigabyte trunk port. Bonding is used primarily to provide network load balancing and fault tolerance.

This tutorial describes how to scan emails for image spam with FuzzyOCR. FuzzyOCR is a plugin for SpamAssassin which is aimed at unsolicited bulk mail containing images as the main content carrier. Using different methods, it analyzes the content and properties of images to distinguish between normal mails (ham) and spam mails. FuzzyOCR tries to keep the system load low by scanning only mails that have not already been categorized as spam by SpamAssassin, thus avoiding unnecessary work.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive - about 32MB.

Sometimes, we are required to resolve our internal domains on a local nameserver and external (internet) domains on our ISP's nameserver. There are different solutions to this problem, but in this tutorial, we are going to solve it through configuring a combination of caching-nameserver and BIND 9.

This guide describes how to install Ubuntu (Ubuntu+GNOME) or Kubuntu (Ubuntu+KDE) 6.06.1 LTS (Dapper Drake) on a single or a multi-boot RAID system. It is meant as a variation of Ubuntu Wiki FakeRAID HowTo document, but digested and with minimum commentary. Its goal is to allow new Ubuntu users to complete an entire installation within 30 minutes, almost entirely by copy and paste.

This tutorial shows how to install and use VirtualBox on Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4, and OpenSuSE 10.2. InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

This article shows how to set up a Postfix virtual mailserver with Courier-IMAP, Maildrop and the PostfixAdmin web interface. We will secure our mailserver with Mailscanner and ClamAV as anti-virus and SpamAssassin as anti-spam. The setup is based on CentOS 4.4.

With BixData you can monitor your servers as well as VMware and Xen. BixData includes pre-built plugins for things like CPU, Memory, Disk, etc. but any good monitoring tool needs to be customizable. BixData includes the basic ability to run scripts and record their exit values, similar to Nagios Plugins. BixData 2.7 adds support for importing data in more complex formats. This allows you to monitor almost anything. I'll go through the steps showing you how to monitor MySQL locally where an agent is installed and then the steps to monitor a device remotely through SNMP. The advantage of BixData is that any data available through a BixAgent works with the standard tools such as the situation room, scoreboards, notifications and the reporting system. All data are stored in standard SQL tables and are easily accessible.

This tutorial describes how to set up and run an UnrealIRCD server on OpenSuSE 10.2 and Fedora Core 6. It also shows how to install Anope IRC services. Anope is a set of Services for IRC networks that allows users to manage their nicks and channels in a secure and efficient way, and administrators to manage their network with powerful tools.

This guide shows how to remove a failed hard drive from a Linux RAID1 array (software RAID), and how to add a new hard disk to the RAID1 array without losing data.

This tutorial shows how you can back up Linux and Windows systems with BackupPC. BackupPC acts as a server and is installed on a Linux system, and from there it can connect to all Linux and Windows systems in your local network to back them up and restore them without interfering with the user's work on that system. On the clients minimal to no configuration is needed. BackupPC supports full and incremental backups, and it comes with a neat web frontend for the administrator and normal user so that backups and recoveries can be managed through a web browser. It should be noted, however, that BackupPC does file-based backups, not bit-wise backups like Ghost4Linux, for example, so it is not made for disk/partition imaging.

This article shows how to set up your own news-voting website with Pligg. Pligg is a content-management system published under the Affero General Public License, and it is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database for storing its data. With a little work you can create your own community and let users vote news to the front page.

This article shows how you can modify the partitioning of your Linux system with GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) without losing data. This includes resizing partitions (enlarging and shrinking), moving partitions on the hard drive, creating and deleting partitions, and even modifying filesystem types. GParted is a free partition editor available as a desktop program and also as a Live-CD. It supports the following filesystems: ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, reiserfs, reiser4, ufs, xfs, and even ntfs (Windows).