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Managing power consumption in a Datacenter is a key factor in helping keep overall business energy costs down and ensuring servers are running at optimum performance. Overheating can lead to increased costs for cooling and also runs the risk of servers crashing. Opsview server monitoring software can be used to check and alert on server temperature and also the temperature of individual components within a server (Memory, CPU and Hard drives). Thresholds and alerts can be set for when critical temperatures are exceeded, helping to keep hot-running servers in check. This blog post details how to configure Opsview to monitor the temperature of Linux and Unix servers.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Scientific Linux 6.3 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 tutorial shows how you can install Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop on Fedora 18. Since it has now been included in the repositories this can now be done quite quickly. Fedora's default desktop at the moment is GNOME 3.

This tutorial describes how you can build nginx from source on Debian Squeeze. Additionally, we will include some useful 3rd-party modules like the naxsi WAF (web application firewall), SPDY etc.

Thunar is the default file manager for XFCE desktops. While it is easy to integrate DropBox into Nautilus, the default file manager for GNOME, it is not so trivial for Thunar. This guide explains how to use DropBox with the Thunar file manager on a Fedora 18 XFCE desktop.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into PureFTPd for virus scanning on a Fedora 18 system. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through PureFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 18 desktop (with the XFCE desktop environment) 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 is a short tutorial on how to find out weak passwords for your mail users. This will save you you a huge headache since spammers will find out mail accounts with weak passwords and send spam emails which will result in your mail server being blacklisted.

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.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to configure PureFTPd to accept TLS sessions on a Fedora 18 server.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 12.10) 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 (Ubuntu 12.10 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 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 tutorial shows how you can install and run a Contao 3.x web site on a Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu 12.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use EncFS on Fedora 18 to encrypt your data.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Debian 6.0, using GlusterFS and SAMBA, and custom scripts and settings to make life easier. The SAMBA share will reside on a GlusterFS share which consists out of two storage nodes for high-availability.

Nagios is a monitoring tool under GPL licence. This tool lets you monitor servers, network hardware (switches, routers, ...) and applications. A lot of plugins are available and its big community makes Nagios the biggest open source monitoring tool. This tutorial shows how to install Nagios 3.4.4 on CentOS 6.3.

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache 2.4 webserver on a Fedora 18 server with PHP5 (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites. On Apache 2.4, we need Apache's mod_proxy_fcgi module to make it work.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping across four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 12.10) with GlusterFS. The client system (Ubuntu 12.10 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.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Fedora 18 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 18 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.