RackWire.com now offers Debian 6 Linux Server on its Cloud Hosting Platform. The Debian Project released its new stable version 6.0 (code name Squeeze
). Debian 6.0 includes the KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, the GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments as well as all kinds of server applications. It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.2 of the LSB.
When you launch a cloud sever on the Xen Cloud Platform, it is built with the default Windows Server 2008 drivers. In order to get the best screen resolutions and refresh performance when using RDP you will want to adjust the Xen Display Drivers.
Go to Start-> Devices and Printers->then open the Xen vif device.
Go to Hardware->Properties->Advanced. Change the Checksum Offload to “Disabled”. Change Large Send Offload to “Disabled”.
If you are running a RackWire.com Ubuntu 10.04 Virtual Server, Ubuntu 10.04 Dedicated Server, or Ubuntu 10.04 Cloud Server on RackWire.com you can install a GUI by using a tool like Putty to SSH into the server to configure their applications. If you are looking to run a Graphical User Interface (GUI) you can follow the steps below to access a GUI on your Cloud Ubuntu Linux Server.
Step 1: Deploy a Ubuntu 10.04 Server with at least 1GB to handle the OS and Processing.
Step 2: Using the Cloud Console log into the server with root / password of the server. Run the following commands on the server:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install xubuntu-desktop icewm menu
apt-get install tightvncserver
vncserver :2
Step 3: Access the Linux GUI by running VNC (Dedicated IP Address:2), as you cannot connect using RDP as you would with a Windows 2008 Server. If you do not have a copy of VNC, you can download a free copy of Tight VNC Here. You can now access the Ubuntu GUI and install any needed applications.
Ubuntu 10.04 Review: The laptop was running Windows 7.0 a little slow, so I decided to try installing Ubuntu 10.04. With my fear of commitment, I decided to run Ubuntu off a USB stick at first and kick the tires and test the speed. So I downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 here. The site is very straight forward and has guides on creating the install CD as well as running the installer or booting Ubuntu 10.04 off a USB Memory Stick (USB Memory Stick Installer here).
My recommendations are to download the USB Installer/Runtime and give it a shot. It might just speed up that old laptop you have or be a free option for a new OS. Screen Shots:
With a Dedicated Server running Proxmox VE, you can build and deploy your own Linux VPS Systems. Here is a list of some of the Linux Operating System Tempaltes Available:
There area also a number of Application Tempaltes Currently available including: SugarCRM, Zenoss, MediaWiki, Acquia Drupal, Drupal, Joomla!, Zimbra, RT Request Tracker, WordPress, BlueOnyx, eyeOS, FrontAccounting, Moodle, OpenGOO, OrangeHRM, SimpleInvoices, vTigerCRM, PBX in a Flash, FreePBX, SMEServer KVM, X11 Terminal Server
For more information and up to date release info visit: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Get_Virtual_Appliances
Also here is a listing of standard OpenVZ Templates: http://wiki.openvz.org/Download/template/precreated
In our Datacenter we have two Diesel Generators, Three Load Balanced Fiber Rings, Dual Power Feeds, Redundant Network and Hardware Nodes. When you are looking for a High Availability Hosting Solutions, the greatest point of failure is your Single Web Server. Hardware Loadbalancing offers a way to remove the single point of failure in your application.
To get hardware loadbalancing you must have at least 2 or more VPS or Application Servers. The Load Balancer will then divide the load between multiple servers, and reduces the actual load on the server. The hardware device will even take the SSL encryption off the server and carry the SSL encryption load for you.
The different modes available for Load Balancing are: Round Robin, Fastest Response Time, Least Connections, Weighted Round Robin, or a Custom/adaptive Type. A simple explanation would be to say if you run an e-commerce web site; You are like a grocery store, and you want to get a user through the checkout lane the fastest. Right now you only have one checkout lane, and customers are lining up. If you “Load Balance” and open a second checkout lane the user load or wait time is cut in half. If the register runs out of receipt tape (i.e. Server crash), users can switch to the other checkout lane. The end goal, you want ensure the fastest and most reliable service to your customers, so they do not shop elsewhere. I am sure we have all seen a customer leave a store because the line was too long, or the site was not available.
Another benefit of Loadbalancing two servers is being able to take a server off-line to do an upgrade or patch on the system with Zero Downtime to the entire application. This is a common practice used in patching enterprise applications.
Hardware Loadbalancing of a VPS or Dedicated server is one way to ensure 100% uptime of your enterprise application. You can also now view your server load balancing configuration and availability in the Client Area, under your Load Balancing Service.
If you are running a CentOS 5.4 on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with no Control Panel at RackWire.com, yum does not come installed by default. To Install yum on CentOS 5.4 run the following commands:
rpm -ivh –force http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/yum-3.2.22-20.el5.centos.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/python-iniparse-0.2.3-4.el5.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/rpm-python-4.4.2.3-18.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/python-urlgrabber-3.1.0-5.el5.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/yum-fastestmirror-1.1.16-13.el5.centos.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-3.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/m2crypto-0.16-6.el5.6.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/libxml2-2.6.26-2.1.2.8.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/nss-devel-3.12.3.99.3-1.el5.centos.2.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/nspr-devel-4.7.4-1.el5_3.1.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/pkgconfig-0.21-2.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/pkinit-nss-0.7.6-1.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/nspr-4.7.4-1.el5_3.1.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/libselinux-devel-1.33.4-5.5.el5.i386.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/libsepol-devel-1.15.2-2.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/elfutils-libelf-devel-0.137-3.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/elfutils-libelf-devel-static-0.137-3.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/rpm-devel-4.4.2.3-18.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/centos/5.4/os/x86_64/CentOS/sqlite-devel-3.3.6-5.x86_64.rpm
Enjoy and Contact RackWire.com Support if you need any assistance!
One of the virtualization platforms that we utilize is Parallels Virtuozzo. Generally, we will use OS templates created by Parallels to setup our Virtual Instances. These OS templates do not have yum, which is an automatic updater and package installer/remover, installed on them by default. Because of this, we will need to find all of the RPMs that are needed by the yum package manually.
It turns out that you will need to install 65 different packages in order to install yum. I have spent the time to find out all of these packages and here is the command that you can run to install yum on Fedora Core 12:
rpm -ivh –force http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/yum-3.2.25-1.fc12.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/pygpgme-0.1-17.20090824bzr68.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/python-iniparse-0.3.0-3.fc12.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/rpm-python-4.7.1-6.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-14.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/python-urlgrabber-3.9.1-2.fc12.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/gpgme-1.1.8-2.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/glibc-2.11-2.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libxml2-2.7.6-1.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/popt-1.13-6.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/python-libs-2.6.2-2.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/glib2-2.22.2-2.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/rpm-4.7.1-6.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/rpm-libs-4.7.1-6.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/elfutils-libelf-0.143-1.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libcap-2.16-5.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/nss-3.12.4-14.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/gcc-4.4.2-7.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/nss-util-3.12.4-8.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/glibc-devel-2.11-2.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libgcc-4.4.2-7.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libgomp-4.4.2-7.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/glibc-headers-2.11-2.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/nspr-4.8.2-1.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libattr-2.4.43-4.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/kernel-headers-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libacl-2.2.47-5.fc12.i686.rpm ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/Packages/bzip2-libs-1.0.5-6.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/db4-4.7.25-13.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/lua-5.1.4-4.fc12.i686.rpm ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/Packages/xz-libs-4.999.9-0.1.beta.20091007git.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/file-libs-5.03-9.fc12.i686.rpm ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/Packages/libselinux-2.0.87-1.fc12.i686.rpm ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/Packages/zlib-1.2.3-23.fc12.i686.rpm ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/updates/12/i386/sqlite-3.6.20-1.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/python-pycurl-7.19.0-4.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/gnupg2-2.0.13-1.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libgpg-error-1.6-4.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/pth-2.0.7-9.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/glibc-common-2.11-2.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/nss-softokn-freebl-3.12.4-10.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/gamin-0.1.10-5.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/cloog-ppl-0.15.7-1.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/cpp-4.4.2-7.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/ncurses-libs-5.7-3.20090207.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/readline-6.0-3.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libcurl-7.19.6-10.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/dirmngr-1.0.3-3.fc12.i686.rpm ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/Packages/libgcrypt-1.4.4-8.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libksba-1.0.6-3.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/openldap-2.4.18-5.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libusb-0.1.12-22.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/pinentry-0.7.6-4.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/gmp-4.3.1-5.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/ppl-0.10.2-10.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/mpfr-2.4.1-3.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libcom_err-1.41.9-5.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/krb5-libs-1.7-8.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libidn-1.9-5.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/nss-softokn-3.12.4-10.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libssh2-1.2-2.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/openssl-1.0.0-0.10.beta3.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/cyrus-sasl-lib-2.1.23-4.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/libstdc%2b%2b-4.4.2-7.fc12.i686.rpm http://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/keyutils-libs-1.2-6.fc12.i686.rpm
If you see any dependency errors, please contact support and let us know so that we can update the command.
All of our Virtual Private Servers come with yum pre-installed for your convenience.
As administrators of hundreds of Linux servers, we are always looking to automate tasks at RackWire. One tool we have come to really appreciate is Expect. Expect is a program that “talks” to other interactive programs according to a script. Following the script, Expect knows what can be expected from a program and what the correct response should be. This is great for automating tasks over telnet, ftp, sftp, ssh and others.
Here is an example of a simple Expect script that logs into a remote machine and downloads a file over SFTP:
spawn sftp user@myserver.com
expect -exact "Connecting to myserver.com...\r
user@myserver.com's password: "
send -- "MySecretPassword\r"
expect -exact "\r
sftp> "
send -- "progress\r"
expect -exact "progress\r
Progress meter disabled\r
sftp> "
send -- "get index.html\r"
expect -exact "get index.html\r
Fetching /home/user/index.html to index.html\r
sftp> "
send -- "exit\r"
expect eof
In the above example, our expect script connects to myserver.com over SFTP, logs in, disables the progress meter (a good practice in case the file size is a variable), downloads index.html and then logs out. This could be a useful script if you needed to download a specific file every hour. If the job we were automating was more complicated than the above example, it may take a while to write the expect script. Enter autoexpect.
Autoexpect is used to generate an Expect script from watching a session. Basically you tell autoexpect what program you want to run and what file you want to save the results to. You then interactively walk through the program and it will generate your expect script for you. For example, If I wanted to automate the creation of my example expect script above, I would simply do this:
autoexpect -f sftp-example.exp sftp user@myserver.com
I would then walk through the sftp prompts as I would a normal session. When completed, we will have a new file created named “sftp-example.exp” which contains our expect script. To run it, we would do:
expect sftp-example.exp
There you have it, your SFTP session is now fully automated!
Most network administrators are likely familiar with Virtual Local Area Network’s or VLANs. VLANs allow several different networks to coexist on the same physical switch. Let’s say you have two physical networks, one used for Internet traffic and an internal network used specifically for backup traffic. In a non-VLANd environment, this setup would require two physical switches (one for the Internet and one of the backup network) and dual network cards on each host you wish to connect to both VLANs.
Using VLANs, one could setup a switch with multiple networks. Typically a host would require one network interface for each network, or VLAN you wanted to connect it to. In this article, I will describe how to configure a single network interface in CentOS to connect to multiple VLANs coming from a switch.
* Configuring your switch for VLANing is beyond the scope of this article and will not be covered here. I would recommend checking the documentation provided by your hardware vendor for instructions on configuring your VLANs from a switch level.
Requirements
In order to configure your network adapter for VLAN, it is require your network driver supports VLAN. If not, it may be necessary to patch your driver or upgrade your hardware. You will also need to configure the interface on your switch to send tagged traffic (a trunk port) for each VLAN ID you want to connect to to the port that connects to your host.
Using vconfig to setup your VLANs
We have two networks we want to connect to:
VLAN ID 10: Internet traffic
VLAN ID 20: Backup network traffic
Add the VLANs:
vconfig add eth0 10
vconfig add eth0 20
This will create two virtual devices on eth0. You can use ifconfig to see information on the device:
ifconfig eth0.10
ifconfig eth0.20
Now we can use ifconfig to set an IP address on our devices:
ifconfig eth0.10 1.2.3.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 1.2.3.255 up
ifconfig eth0.20 192.168.1.11 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255 up
You can also view information on the virtual device / VLAN:
cat /proc/net/vlan/eth0.10
cat /proc/net/vlan/eth0.20
…and finally if you wish to remove the VLAN / bring down the virtual interface:
ifconfig eth0.10 down
vconfig rem eth0.10
ifconfig eth0.20 down
vconfig rem eth0.20
