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Drupal is a great CMS but is a bit hefty when you host it on bargain-basement shared hosting, and virtual private servers are great but memory-constrained at the low-end. Apache can be a big offender when it comes to resource usage, so a nice alternative is nginx, a fast, light-weight and efficient http server that supports PHP via PHP-FastCGI. So this is a pretty slick setup for hosting Drupal, and I've taken a few different howtos and forum posts to put together this guide, which should have all you need in one stop, including a working URL rewrite config.

PostgreSQL is a great database server, but when your dataset is rather large, migrating a server by using pg_dump can be a rather long process. In this tutorial we will discuss a way to migrate a entire server with as little downtime as possible. To achieve this, we will be using the PostgreSQL built in features for PITR (Point in time recovery).

This guide explains how to set up mod_chroot with Apache2 on a Fedora 12 system. With mod_chroot, you can run Apache2 in a secure chroot environment and make your server less vulnerable to break-in attempts that try to exploit vulnerabilities in Apache2 or your installed web applications.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running CentOS 5.4) to one large storage server (distributed storage) with GlusterFS. The client system (CentOS 5.4 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. 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 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless CentOS 5.4 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Mandriva 2010.0 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Fedora 12 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 document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Mandriva 2010.0 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.

Ubuntu Tweak is a tool that lets you change hidden Ubuntu settings, for example: hide or change the splash screen, show or hide the Computer, Home, Trash, and Network icons, change Metacity, Nautilus, power management, and security settings, etc. Currently Ubuntu Tweak is available only for the Ubuntu GNOME desktop, i.e., it will not work on Kubuntu or Xubuntu. This short guide shows how to install and use Ubuntu Tweak.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running CentOS 5.4) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (CentOS 5.4 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. 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 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on an OpenSUSE 11.2 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 explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless Mandriva 2010.0 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (CentOS 5.4) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (CentOS 5.4 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. 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 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on CentOS 5.4. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. 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 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Ubuntu 9.10. I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices in a round-robin fashion and thus written concurrently) across four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) with GlusterFS. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. 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 servers 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 so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on a CentOS 5.4 server. From the Suhosin project page: "Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections."

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless Fedora 12 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.