debian

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Etch 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 how-to describes how to install and configure Dansguardian with multi-group filtering, Squid with NTLM auth, ipmasq, and dnsmasq to provide a full internet gateway solution for small to medium sized networks. This how-to requires two NICs in order to perform firewalling and transparent proxying.

This article describes how to integrate DSPAM with embedded ClamAV into a mail server based on Postfix featuring virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. DSPAM is a scalable and open-source content-based spam filter. The setup shown here is suitable for Debian Etch servers.

This tutorial shows how to configure a MySQL 5.1 cluster with five nodes: 1 x management, 2 x storage nodes and 2 x balancer nodes. This cluster is load-balanced by an Ultra Monkey package which provides heartbeat (for checking if the other node is still alive) and ldirectord (to split up the requests to the nodes of the MySQL cluster).

LedgerSMB is a free (licensed under the GPL), web based double entry accounting system written in Perl which uses PostgreSQL for data storage. It is intended for small and medium businesses (SMB), and it can be used easily through a regular web browser like Firefox. This tutorial explains how to install LedgerSMB on a Debian Etch system.

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. Usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. This document describes how to install a vsftpd 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.

This tutorial explains how to install Django on a Debian Etch server. Django is a web framework that allows to develop Python web applications quickly with as much automation as possible. I will use it with Apache2 and mod_python in this guide.

This article shows how you can install Ruby on Rails (RoR) and integrate it in Apache2 on a Debian Etch system. Ruby on Rails is a web application framework which is rapidly gaining popularity among web programmers. It aims to increase the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created and offers skeleton code frameworks (scaffolding) from the outset. Applications using the RoR framework are developed using the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and keepalived on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using keepalived, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. HAProxy is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).