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Taking control of system logs -- How to install Logger

This is a HOWTO for installing Logger, a Linux-based logging utility, and taking control of your system logs. System logs can be overwhelming and are most often overlooked; many users simply do not know what to do with them or how to maintain them. Log maintenance can be a daunting task, especially if Web or mail server applications are also involved in the maintenance schedule. My goal here is to provide a simple methodology that anyone running Linux can use.

Booting Linux in Less Than 40 Seconds

Have you ever dreamt about booting Linux in less than one minute? Now this dream can come true: in less than 40 seconds after pressing the power button, you will have a perfect fully-functional operating system, exactly as you left the last session. Even better than you thought, right? Now you could say: "Crazy boy - I don't believe you!" Well then, check it out for yourself.

Configuring a DNS Server

Step 1. Create named.conf file with the following content:

Note: options "directory", ", "pid-file", "dump-file", "statistics-file" might have other values if you configure bind server on Linux. The following values are for FreeBSD.

New Use for Old Hardware: Network RAID Backup

Long unused, the old P166 PC seemed like it ought to have some use left in it. Then I remembered the 2nd hard drive wasting time in the other PC; the combination of the old PC and a 2nd drive seemed like a good candidate for a RAID, to be used as backup storage over the network. As it turns out, that was perfectly realistic and not too much work, at least if you know what you are doing. I learned a lot.

Troubleshooting Apache using strace

Occasionally system administrators can run into situations where the conventional way of troubleshooting an issue may not yield results. The conventional way means using test scripts, observing the log files, tweaking configuration settings and the like. In such cases, one will have to dig deeper into the internals of the server.

Installing Chilisoft on Linux

ASP is a server side scripting engine for dynamic web pages. ASP pages contain server-side scripts and HTML tags. As a Microsoft Technology, it works with Microsoft IIS webserver. You can't run ASP apps on other web servers like Apache, SUN Web Server, Zeus Web Server without using a special application such as ChiliASP or InstantASP.

Rule-based DoS attacks prevention shell script

In this article, I describe a simple rule-based DoS attack-prevention shell script. However, the proposed shell script is not a perfect tool for preventing DoS attacks, but a powerful tool for alleviating DoS attacks overheads of the Linux servers significantly.

Description of Windows 2003 Server DNS Stub Zones

DNS stub zones are a new feature in Windows 2003 server. What are they, what do they do and are they of any benefit? In this article I try and answer these questions and make the complicated subject of DNS that little bit easier. 

Reasons to upgrade to Windows 2003 Server

System administrators like myself always want the latest technologies. With Longhorn still in beta and not yet a viable option many companies using the “One operating system behind” policy are now looking at upgrading to 2003 server. This is not a system I agree with as Windows 2003 server has been stable and better than W2k since service pack 1 in my opinion.

The Linux Virtual File System

“Everything is a file in Linux” is an oft repeated statement. What this basically implies is that all the devices (Hard disks,CD ROMs, Floppy Disks, USB Sticks,etc) are all treated as files. Just to explain this a bit more ,let us consider the C function write(f,&buf,len) . You must have used this function to write len bytes of data contained in buf to a file whose File Descriptor is given by f. Linux allows you to use the same function to write to a floppy (in the simplest of cases) as well. This is because everything capable of input and output is treated as a file in Linux. This is one of the two major abstractions in Linux, the other being a Process.

IISCnfg.vbs - IIS Settings Replication

Microsoft provides a tool called IISCnfg for management of the Internet Information Services (IIS) Settings. One of the features that this includes is the ability to replicate the IIS settings from one server to another. This is useful in a webfarm environment where you require all web servers to be in sync.

How To Optimize Your AdWords Copy

Although Google's AdWords may be the best way of getting targetted, business-generating traffic to your website, it is often not as easy as it sounds. Since many people could be trying to use AdWords, you have to use this program carefully in order to leverage its functions. Just for your information, I know a person who is earning $90 per hour for just writing optimized AdWords ads for his clients.

Configuring Apache for Maximum Performance

Apache is an open-source HTTP server implementation. It is the most popular web server on the Internet; the December 2005 Web Server Survey conducted by Netcraft [1] shows that about 70% of the web sites on Internet are using Apache.

Kernel Compilation

If you have decided to re-compile your kernel it essentially means that either the current kernel configuration does not fulfill your needs or your are upgrading to the latest kernel.I needed to upgrade my 2.4 to 2.6 for working with my Bluetooth dongle.

LAMP vs. LAMP Rematch

Two very popular and widely used languages for building dynamic web sites are Perl and PHP. They make up two thirds of the "P" in the Linux Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack. How does their performance, using mod_perl and mod_php, compare for everyday web programming? I attempted to find out.