Articles by Falko Timme

Falko Timme

About Falko Timme

Falko Timme is an experienced Linux administrator and founder of Timme Hosting, a leading nginx business hosting company in Germany. He is one of the most active authors on HowtoForge since 2005 and one of the core developers of ISPConfig since 2000. He has also contributed to the O'Reilly book "Linux System Administration".

  • Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2008.0

    mandriva Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 0

    Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2008.0 In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2008.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • How To Check If Your Server Is Infected With The Linux/Rst-B Backdoor (Debian Etch)

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 2

    How To Check If Your Server Is Infected With The Linux/Rst-B Backdoor (Debian Etch) Linux Rst-B is a backdoor that can be used to add your server to botnets (see http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/103563 (in German)). This short guide explains how you can install and use the Sophos Linux/RST-B detection tool to check your Debian Etch server and find out if it is infected with Linux Rst-B.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Installing The eZ Publish CMS On An Ubuntu 7.10 Server

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 1

    Installing The eZ Publish CMS On An Ubuntu 7.10 Server eZ Publish is one of the most well known and widespread web content management systems. Because its setup is not trivial, this tutorial shows how to install it on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) server.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Keepalived On Debian Etch

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 8

    Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Keepalived On Debian Etch 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.).

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Debian Etch

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 9

    Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Debian Etch This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and heartbeat 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 heartbeat, 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.).

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Creating Snapshot-Backups with FlyBack On Ubuntu 7.10

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , , • Comments: 1

    Creating Snapshot-Backups with FlyBack On Ubuntu 7.10 FlyBack is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the FlyBack project page: "FlyBack is a snapshot-based backup tool based on rsync. It creates successive backup directories mirroring the files you wish to backup, but hard-links unchanged files to the previous backup. This prevents wasting disk space while providing you with full access to all your files without any sort of recovery program. If your machine crashes, just move your external drive to your new machine and copy the latest backup using whatever file browser you normally use." This article shows how to install and use FlyBack on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Tweaking Hidden Ubuntu Settings With Ubuntu Tweak

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 0

    Tweaking Hidden Ubuntu Settings With Ubuntu Tweak 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.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Installing Apple's Safari Browser On Ubuntu 7.10 With PlayOnLinux

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , • Comments: 0

    Installing Apple's Safari Browser On Ubuntu 7.10 With PlayOnLinux This guide explains how you can install Apple's Safari browser on Ubuntu 7.10. As there is no Linux version of Safari, we will run it under Wine. We will use a tool called PlayOnLinux to install Safari under Wine. With PlayOnLinux you can install lots of Windows games and some Windows applications (such as Office 2003, IE6, MS Money, etc.) on Linux. Installing Safari on Linux is good for people such as web designers who have switched to Linux but still need to test their web sites in other browsers.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • How To Install MySQL 4.1 And PHP4 On Debian Etch

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: , , • Comments: 0

    How To Install MySQL 4.1 And PHP4 On Debian Etch MySQL 4 and PHP 4 are quite old, but you might have PHP applications on your server that require PHP4 and MySQL 4. The problem is that Debian Etch comes with MySQL 5 only, and its PHP4 packages depend on MySQL 5 and don't work with MySQL 4. This guide shows how you can install MySQL 4.1 on Debian Etch along with PHP4 packages that work with MySQL 4.1.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

  • Using The Bazaar Version Control System (VCS) On Debian Etch

    Author: Falko Timme • Tags: • Comments: 1

    Using The Bazaar Version Control System (VCS) On Debian Etch Bazaar is a distributed version control system (VCS) available under the GPL; it's similar to Subversion (svn). Bazaar is sponsored by Canonical, Ltd., the company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and therefore the Ubuntu project is the most prominent user of Bazaar. This article explains how to set up and use Bazaar on a Debian Etch system, and how to configure an SFTP-/HTTP server to host your Bazaar repository.

    read more... | PDF view as pdf

Page 128 of 146