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".

• Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On CentOS 6.3

  Author: Falko Timme • Tags: centos, high-availability, storage • Comments: 3

  This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running CentOS 6.3) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (CentOS 6.3 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

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• Using The btrfs Filesystem (With RAID1) With Ubuntu 12.10 On A Hetzner Server

  Author: Falko Timme • Tags: ubuntu • Comments: 3

  Using The btrfs Filesystem (With RAID1) With Ubuntu 12.10 On A Hetzner Server This tutorial shows how to install Ubuntu 12.10 on the btrfs filesystem (with RAID1) on a Hetzner server with two hard drives. While Hetzner's installimage tool doesn't list btrfs as a supported filesystem and only supports software RAID with /dev/md devices, it is still possible to achieve this setup and use the built-in RAID support in btrfs instead of using /dev/md devices.

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• High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS 3.2.x On CentOS 6.3 - Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

  Author: Falko Timme • Tags: centos, high-availability, storage • Comments: 4

  This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (CentOS 6.3) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (CentOS 6.3 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

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• Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS 3.2.x On CentOS 6.3

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

  This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on CentOs 6.3. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

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• VBoxHeadless - Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.2 On A Headless Ubuntu 12.10 Server

  Author: Falko Timme • Tags: ubuntu, virtualbox, virtualization • Comments: 3

  VBoxHeadless - Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.2 On A Headless Ubuntu 12.10 Server This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.2 on a headless Ubuntu 12.10 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

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• Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Ubuntu 12.10 (Initiator And Target)

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

  This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running Ubuntu 12.10. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

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• Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On CentOS 6.3 (Initiator And Target)

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

  This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running CentOS 6.3. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

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• Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On CentOS 6.3

  Author: Falko Timme • Tags: centos, storage • Comments: 5

  This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on CentOS 6.3. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

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• Installing SugarCRM Community Edition On Fedora 17

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

  Installing SugarCRM Community Edition On Fedora 17 SugarCRM is a webbased CRM solution written in PHP. SugarCRM is available in different flavours called "Editions" ("Community" (free), "Professional", and "Enterprise"). For a detailed overview of the different editions, have a look at the SugarCRM website. In this tutorial I will describe the installation of the free Community Edition on Fedora 17. With the modules My Portal, Calendar, Activities, Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases, Bugtracker, Documents and Email, SugarCRM Community Edition offers everything that can be expected from a CRM solution.

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• Installing KVM Guests With virt-install On Ubuntu 12.10 Server

  Author: Falko Timme • Tags: kvm, ubuntu, virtualization • Comments: 0

  Installing KVM Guests With virt-install On Ubuntu 12.10 Server Unlike virt-manager, virt-install is a command line tool that allows you to create KVM guests on a headless server. You may ask yourself: "But I can use vmbuilder to do this, why do I need virt-install?" The difference between virt-install and vmbuilder is that vmbuilder is for creating Ubuntu-based guests, whereas virt-install lets you install all kinds of operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and distributions in a guest, just like virt-manager. This article shows how you can use it on an Ubuntu 12.10 KVM server.

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