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RedHat Enterprise Linux is known for it’s security and stability on servers. Later this year, Redhat will release Enterprise Linux 6.0 and CentOS will release their version shortly after. CentOS is built entirely from RedHat’s sources. They are basically the same thing minus the RedHat artwork and support. What do you think about using it on your home desktop?

I came close to using CentOS 5.5 100% at home. The downfall

was multimedia applications such as k9copy and Kdenlive. CentOS/RedHat 5 is based off Fedora 6, which is very old. However, version 6 will be based off Fedora 12 which was just surpassed by Fedora 13. Fedora 12 was a great release in my opinion because it was stable and had recent versions of all the applications that I needed. After trying the RedHat 6.0 beta, I was able to install all of my modern applications and be 100% productive at home and work.

My question to all of you out there is would you use CentOS/RedHat on your home desktop? What are your thoughts? Do the non-bleeding edge packages matter to you? My opinion now is that release 6 may be good on the desktop for a year or so before the age of the packages starts to show. How long do you think you can use enterprise Linux for?   Would you feel that you are missing out on the new desktop Linux features?

The fourth update to the Mephisto 1.10 series has been released. New features were back-ported from v11 to increase stability because the 1.10 branch is going for stability. This project is also looking for developers for new features and stronger development. If interested, please email phillip.tribble@gmail.com. Documentation engineers are also appreciated.

This program can do simple backups and syncs over a network or locally. Mephisto Backup was made with the Java programming language. The key feature of this program is the ability to backup your system to an image and copy it to a Linux Live DVD for future restoration. The user can then take that cd and move his or her system to any PC.

Location: http://mephistobackup.webhop.org/

Also, test out the v1.11 beta and submit feedback =)

I had an idea on how to make the upgrade process easier for my Fedora installation. I had Fedora 12 installed and wanted to upgrade to Fedora 13 with the same programs installed. The same concept can be applied to most distributions.

Instructions:

1. On my Fedora 12 box:
rpm -qa | cut -d – -f 1 > packages.txt

This command will print all the installed packages and remove the version information and architecture.

2. Install Fedora 13.

3. Copy packages.txt from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.

4. Copy .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.

5. yum install -y –skip-broken `cat packages.txt`

6. Done. =)

My backup web server has a 8GB CF card. I want to reduce the number of writes to it as much as possible to save money and keep my server healthy. I added the following to my /etc/rc.local so that the logs files are created in RAM every time the server boots. The only downfall to this is that you will not have any logs if the system crashes to diagnose the problem, oh well =)

How it works:

1. Create the ram disk directory.
2. Mount the ram file system.
3. Erase old logs.
4. Use touch to create an empty log file in the ram disk directory.
5. Link the log file in the ram disk directory to /var/log

[ /etc/rc.local ]
#Creates a tmpfs RAM disk and mount it
mkdir /ramfs;mount -t tmpfs /dev/ram0 /ramfs;mkdir /ramfs/httpd
LOG[0]=messages
LOG[1]=secure
LOG[2]=maillog
LOG[3]=yum.log
LOG[4]=rpmpkgs
LOG[5]=dmesg
LOG[6]=boot.log
LOG[7]=spooler
LOG[8]=scrollkeeper.log
LOG[9]=cron
LOG[10]=Xorg.0.log
LOG[11]=acpid
LOG[12]=btmp
LOG[13]=wtmp

LOG[14]=httpd/access_log

LOG[15]=httpd/error_log

for ((c=0;c<=15;c++))
do
rm -f /var/log/${LOG[c]};touch /ramfs/${LOG[c]};ln -s /ramfs/${LOG[c]} /var/log/${LOG[c]}
done

http://openhatch.org/ offers members of the community to contribute to open source projects even if your not a programmer.

“OpenHatch was founded in May 2009 by three alumni of the free culture and free software movements. The company was part of startup incubator Shotput Ventures‘ inaugural class.

Our core product is an open source software involvement engine. For developers, we provide tools to demonstrate and broaden their experience and expertise in the open source community. Our vision is to make the open source community better connected, more productive, and ultimately well rewarded for its expertise.” http://openhatch.org/

“NILFS2 (New Implementation of a Log-Structured File System Version 2) is a very promising new log-structured file system that has continuous snapshots and versioning of the entire file system. This means that you can recover files that were deleted or unintentionally modified as well as perform backups at any time from a snapshot without a performance penalty normally associated with creating snapshots. In addition, there is evidence that NILFS has extremely good performance on SSD drives.”

Source: http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7345/1.html

Firewalls are a critical component of keeping your machine safe on the Internet.

This tutorial will show you how to create firewall rules from the command line.

Details of the script actions are commented in the script.

Read the rest of this entry »

Believe it or not, sometimes the display will die on your Linux operating system. You probably have no control over this…..Time to move on and fix the issue without spending hours on Google searching for a half-baked how-to.

If you are in the process of implementing this article on a broken system, chances are that you see a black screen with text. Please follow these steps so that you can get the pretty colors back!

Step 1: Login.

Step 2: Ensure the graphical daemons are not running.

service gdm stop

service kdm stop

Step 3: Run this command:   X -configure

(This will create the following file in your directory: xorg.conf.new)

Step 4: Copy the configuration file to the right place.

mv xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Step 5: Restart the display.

service gdm start (for GNOME users.)

or

service kdm start (for KDE users)

or

startx (for everyone else, the elite)

Step 6: If you are still having problems……

Repeat Steps 1 – 4.

We will change the driver to vesa. Vesa is a generic display driver that will work on any video card. I usually use this driver on all my machines because it is stable and never fails.

Use your favorite text editor and open /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Look for a line that says  something like the following :

Driver      “nv”

Driver      “ati”

Driver      “nvidia”

Driver      “intel”
Change the name from what is in quotes to “vesa”.

Example of how it should be after the change:  Driver      “vea”

Save and exit the file and follow step 5.

I have a webserver with a 4GB CF card in a very very small computer. I was trying to come up with ways to reduce writes on this device and I remembered UnionFS. UnionFS can take 1 folder and make it read-only and have all the changes written to another folder. To the user, everything will look the same. This is very good when adding a disk to a computer and your not using LVM.

What I want to do? I want  /tmp,  /var/log, /var/home, and /root to have the changes written to my USB device that is mounted as  /mnt. These directories receive a lot of writes to them.

I copied the following commands to /etc/rc.local so that they are executed when the machine boots:

—————–

mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/mnt/logs=rw:/var/log=ro unionfs /var/log
mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/mnt/filesystem/root=rw:/root=ro unionfs /root
mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/mnt/filesystem/home=rw:/home=ro unionfs /home
mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/mnt/filesystem/tmp=rw:/tmp=ro unionfs /tmp

—————–

Lets make sure everything worked by doing `df -h`:

—————–

/dev/sda1             3.8G  1.6G  2.1G  44% /

unionfs               7.5G  3.3G  3.8G  47% /var/log
unionfs               7.5G  3.3G  3.8G  47% /root
unionfs               7.5G  3.3G  3.8G  47% /home
unionfs               7.5G  3.3G  3.8G  47% /tmp
-----------------
If you want this to be mounted at boot time without
using /etc/rc.local, simply add the following to /etc/fstab:
-----------------
unionfs /tmp unionfs dirs=/mnt/filesystem/tmp=rw:/tmp=ro 0 0
unionfs /home unionfs dirs=/mnt/filesystem/home=rw:/tmp=ro 0 0
unionfs /var/log unionfs dirs=/mnt/logs=rw:/var/log=ro 0 0
unionfs /root unionfs dirs=/mnt/filesystem/root=rw:/tmp=ro 0 0
-----------------
Now all the changes will be written to my USB device and my main CF
cards will not be written to a lot.

What is Mephisto Backup?

This program can do simple backups and syncs over a network or locally.It uses tar and rsync in the background. Mephisto Backup was made with the Java programming language. The key feature of this program is the ability to backup your system to an image and copy it to a Linux Live DVD for future restoration. The user can then take that cd and move his or her system to any PC.

Features:

1. Backup your operating system to a Live CD.

2. Restore your OS from the Mephisto Live CD. The live CD is used by Mephisto Backup to Restore your system only.

3. Displays the size of your backup ISO and TAR file after each backup job is ran.

4. Blank DVD-RW’s.

5. Sync between locations and save backup configurations.

6. Burn the backup image to the live cd within the program.

7. Backup Schedules.

Additional things to mention:

1. This program is great to use in virtual machines because you can easily generate your virtual machine to a restore disc and deploy the image to any computer!

2. A single source for everything that you have to do: Backup -> Create a disc -> Burn. All in a single application!

3. ITS FLOSS!

Links:

Main website.

Google Code.

Sourceforge.

Contact: Phillip Tribble // phillip.tribble@gmail.com