Articles by 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".
-
Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer With HAProxy/Wackamole/Spread On Debian Etch
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: debian, high-availability •
Comments: 0 Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Wackamole/Spread On Debian Etch This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy, Wackamole, and Spread 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 Wackamole and Spread, 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.).
-
How To Set Up A Caching Reverse Proxy With Squid 2.6 On Debian Etch
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: debian •
Comments: 1 How To Set Up A Caching Reverse Proxy With Squid 2.6 On Debian Etch This article explains how you can set up a caching reverse proxy with Squid 2.6 in front of your web server on Debian Etch. If you have a high-traffic dynamic web site that generates lots of database queries on each request, you can decrease the server load dramatically by caching your content for a few minutes or more (that depends on how often you update your content).
-
The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11.1 (GNOME)
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: desktop, suse •
Comments: 25 The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11.1 (GNOME) This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11.1 desktop 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.
-
-
The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 6 (Felicia)
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: desktop, ubuntu •
Comments: 7 The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) desktop 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. Linux Mint 6 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.
-
Reducing Disk IO By Mounting Partitions With noatime
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux •
Comments: 10 Reducing Disk IO By Mounting Partitions With noatime Linux has a special mount option for file systems called noatime. If this option is set for a file system in /etc/fstab, then reading accesses will no longer cause the atime information (last access time - don't mix this up with the last modified time - if a file is changed, the modification date will still be set) that is associated with a file to be updated (in reverse this means that if noatime is not set, each read access will also result in a write operation). Therefore, using noatime can lead to significant performance gains.
-
How To Rebuild The Squid 2.6 Debian Package with Support For X-Forwarded-For Headers
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: debian •
Comments: 0 How To Rebuild The Squid 2.6 Debian Package with Support For X-Forwarded-For Headers This article describes how you can rebuild the Squid 2.6 package for Debian Etch with support for X-Forwarded-For headers - this feature is not enabled in the default Debian Etch Squid package. This feature is useful if you are using Squid as a reverse proxy for your web site and are using a load balancer (such as HAProxy) in front of Squid - it allows us to track the client's original IP address instead of the load balancer's IP address (which to Squid appears as the client).
-
How To Resize RAID Partitions (Shrink & Grow) (Software RAID)
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux •
Comments: 7 How To Resize RAID Partitions (Shrink & Grow) (Software RAID) This article describes how you can shrink and grow existing software RAID partitions. I have tested this with non-LVM RAID1 partitions that use ext3 as the file system. I will describe this procedure for an intact RAID array and also a degraded RAID array.
-
Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: centos, monitoring •
Comments: 11 Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2 In this article I will describe how you can monitor your CentOS 5.2 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.
-
Useful Uses Of netcat
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux •
Comments: 8 Useful Uses Of netcat This short article shows some useful netcat commands. netcat is known as the TCP/IP swiss army knife. From the netcat man page: netcat is a simple unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.
-
Installing ubuntu-system-panel (USP) On Ubuntu 8.10
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: desktop, ubuntu •
Comments: 20 Installing ubuntu-system-panel (USP) On Ubuntu 8.10 ubuntu-system-panel is a simple launcher for the GNOME desktop, providing easy access to Places, Applications and common configuration items for your computer. This guide shows how to install and configure it on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.
