02. Servers

I started writing a response to a discussion in the latest "Linux Link Tech Show" episode, but ended up with something far too long, so I've split it up into 4 posts. The next post is about the TLLTS vs TWIT debate, and introduces this set of post.

In my early Linux system administration days, when I was first trying to set up a mail server with spam filtering, I ran across a really puzzling bug in Dspam, the software I was trying to get working. While all the other users of the software were getting great results, with Dspam catching 99%+ of all their spam, it was only catching about 70% of my spam after quite a bit of training.

I posted my results, and confusion, to the Dspam mailing list. The original developer of this software (which has thousands of users), Jonathan Zdziarski, responded that that did not sound right.

What's extraordinary about the open source community is that this level of support happens all the time, every day, without charge, in hundreds, thousands of projects out there. People that can get to the bottom of a problem and fix it at the source, not just provide a workaround, are directly reachable and motivated to see their software work as well as possible. They're not hidden away from the public behind a large corporation, unreachable with layers of clueless support script readers stuffed between you and them.

Patrick asks,

Why not OpenSuSE, instead of Ubuntu?

At Freelock, we provide a maintenance service contract to manage Linux servers. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide monitoring, system updates, application updates, and our help recovering anything that goes wrong with an upgrade. We're looking at adding disaster recovery to the mix, raising the price to cover the cost of backing up all of the data and providing varying service level agreements on how soon we will recover your machine from a total loss.

Happy New Year! Here's a quick story about why Linux is the future:

Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift

Good introductory article on monitoring disk usage, with a nice little script to send a mail as filesystems approach their limit:

System Administrators Toolkit: Monitoring disk space and usage
.

Here's a handy article for setting up/configuring a monitoring service on a web server: BobCares :: Outsourced Web Hosting Support :: Installing and Configuring Nagios

Wow. Here's a great, lengthy article detailing all sorts of things about using Linux and open source software in small businesses. Linux: A Buyer's Guide for SMEs--ZDNet UK.

Just stumbled upon a pretty cool web interface to a centralized backup system. You can manage a series of snapshot backups of all the computers on your network. It can automatically send a user an email if there's a repeated problem of missed backups. And users can restore their own backups through the web site.

There are a number of ways to integrate Linux clients and servers into an Active Directory environment. This article discusses a few of them.