variux

Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync

David Edmonson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:45:49 +0000

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Realtime data mirroring under Linux

David Edmonson — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:37:24 +0000

An interesting and seemingly overly complicated way to get this going.

http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2001/article199.shtml

Byte Level Data Replication to Remote Server

David Edmonson — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:26:06 +0000

The following was suggested from http://www.tacticalgamer.com/hardware-software-discussion/88770-byte-level-replication-under-linux.html

“Re: Byte Level Replication under Linux

Update:

After quite a bit of research and product trials I came down to a few solutions.

One of which was not actually replicating the data on our RHEL server but just doing normal byte level replication inside the Windows hosts that we run under VMware on the RHEL box. That proved to be costly as software like DoubleTake isn’t cheap. We would also need a pair of licenses for every Windows host we wanted to replicate.

I looked into another product called NetVault Replicator from BakTrack. This is truly a great product but it’s quite pricey. It would do everything I needed but to the tune of $10,000 per pair of HA servers.

In the end I ended up playing around with DRBD, Heartbeat and Open-iSCSI.

Here’s what I did:

I set up two machines under VM as a test. Installed Fedora 7 on each of them and updated to the latest kernels. I then downloaded DRBD and got that configured on each of the machines. I gave DRBD a physical disk to manage and copied a bunch of files onto the disk on the Primary server. That data was replicated at the block level over to the Secondary server. I then promoted the Secondary server to Primary with DRBD and mounted the volume and all my files were there. Excellent.

Once DRBD was fully tested I downloaded and installed Heartbeat V2. After a couple hours of reading and configuration, I had Heartbeat managing DRBD and the mount/dismount of the volumes. If I failed the primary server, Heartbeat would automatically promote the backup server to primary and mount the drive accordingly. Excellent. I now had automated failover between the two servers.

I tested that for a bit to make sure it was working as planned and attempted various methods of “breaking” the replication to make sure it was stable and would recover from failure in a predictable manner.

When all my testing was done. I went ahead and installed iSCSI on the box and set up fileio block volumes on the DRBD managed drive. I mounted the /dev/drbd0 drive under /mnt/array/ and created block volumes at /mnt/array/iscsi-target0.img, /mnt/array/iscsi-target1.img, and /mnt/array/iscsi-target2. Once the iSCSI targets were created, I used the wonderful (heh, right) iSCSI Initiator 2.04 on my XP machine and mounted the targets. Once mounted, I was able to copy a bunch of files from a local drive to one of the iSCSI drives just as you would to a local drive.

My final failover testing consisted of taking the primary offline and verifying that Heartbeat properly mounted the /dev/drbd0 drive on the secondary and then fired up the iSCSI daemon to export the targets. All worked well. Bringing the primary back on-line automatically triggered a reverse replication from the secondary back to the primary before stopping iSCSI and unmounting the drives on the secondary and then mounting the drives and starting iSCSI on the newly recovered primary.

The only issue I have now is getting the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator to look at at the virtual IP address that Heartbeat tosses back and forth between the servers rather than the physical IP addresses of the two boxes. It appears to just be a Microsoft iSCSI implementation issue, but I need to do a bit more testing to confirm that.

If anyone is in a position where they need to build extremely low-cost high availability file servers, this is a great way to go. I’d gladly share my config files and any tweaks I had to perform to get this running.”

Removing Viruses and Trojan’s

David Edmonson — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:25:20 +0000

For the most part, these two programs will get your average spyware / trojans:

MalwareBytes Anti-Malware

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Spybot Search & Destroy

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/home/index.html

If it goes beyond that, call us!

Benefits of our hosting

David Edmonson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:18:25 +0000

The hosting world is entirely too competitive to be like the norm. So, what do we offer that makes us stand out from the crowd?

We’ll buy your domain for you or teach you to buy your own
We don’t hold anything hostage
We can give you as much space and bandwidth as you really need
You don’t have to know anything about space and bandwidth to host with us
We will help you validate your site so it works better on all the different web browsers
We can give you access to a private, encrypted browsing tunnel for secure email and browsing
We can offer you unlimited, encrypted, off-site data (pronounced dAy-ta if you ask me) storage
We can offer good, clean, free advice on how to get your computer running better, what parts you do and don’t need to buy, and how to get your website in the best form it can be
We are flexible
If we can’t do it, we can find someone who can
We can be reached by text message, chat, phone or email
We are very good at speaking English and can even translate some computer jargon into something that makes sense to the normal human race
We like to have fun and will sit at Starbucks with you while you show us your vacation photos and tell us about your adventures (perhaps that would be more interesting to our customers if we were the GoDaddy girls)
We want you to do good and then refer someone else
…and finally we’ll compensate you well for your referrals

So…what are you waiting for? Give us a call and setup your account. That’s what we are here for. 678-667-2185 or on our handy toll free number that John doesn’t even know we have: 800-983-4229

How to empty trash from SSH or terminal on Ubuntu Fiesty 8.04 and above

David Edmonson — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:33:38 +0000

Just a quick note for anyone using Ubuntu 8.04 Use this in terminal instead.

sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

Add in the “v” if you want to see it in action

sudo rm -rfv ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

Setup a Dreamweaver Site to work with cPanel and FTP

David Edmonson — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:21:01 +0000

This method bypasses the Wizard and uses Advanced Settings

As elementary as it may be, I would be remiss if I did not state the obvious prerequesites for this process.

A domain name (which we at variux.com will provide)
Correct DNS settings if you are hosting with a company other than where you bought your domain name
Unix hosting with cPanel (which we at variux.com will provide)
This process was done from a Windows XP machine, but the Mac and Vista process is going to be very similar
These instructions were written for Dreamweaver MX 2004 but also work flawlessly for CS3
If these instructions are too hard for you, then you should definitely host with us because we can help you!

Open Dreamweaver
From the top menu (File, Edit, View, Insert, etc…) click on “Site”
Select “Manage Site” > Then Click “New…” > Click Site
A new, smaller window will open > in the top left corner there should be two tabs, “Basic” and “Advanced” > Click on the “Advanced” tab.
Enter your domain name in Site Name. i.e. thehousebuyer123.com (No www)
Enter the “Local Root Folder.” i.e. My Documents\Websites\thehousebuyer123.com. If the directory is not already created, Dreamweaver will create
it for you. You can browse to the folder’s location by hitting the little folder directly to the right of the form field.
Enter the site’s HTTP Address: http://www.thehousebuyer123.com
From the left-side menu in this window, select the “Remote Info” option
From the drop-down box, select “FTP”

Enter the site’s URL as the FTP Host: thehousebuyer123.com (No www)
In the Host directory: “public_html” (this is default with cPanel, unless it is a subdomain of your hosting account)
Enter your UserName (typically the first 8 characters of your domain name unless your domain starts with a number) and Password from your text file.
This info is provided by your hosting company.
Click the Test button. If there are errors be sure you typed all the info correctly and contact your hosting company for support.
If it works, click OK. If you are on DSL click the Passive Transfer box then click OK.
Click “OK” > Click “Done”

Best Place to Buy Domain Names

David Edmonson — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:03:01 +0000

We are constantly buying new domain names and often are asked by our customers where they should buy their domains. There is one answer for your next domain name registrar:

name.com and godaddy.com

You might think I’m retarded because that is 2 answers. But…it’s not!

Buy your new domains at name.com and take advantage of their free domain name privacy.

Then, once you have 5 or more that need renewing, transfer them to godaddy.com and they give you free privacy on the transfered accounts. Use the promo code: OYH3 to get the transfers for $6.95/yr on going. Of course you can always buy for more than a year at a time and make the price cheaper.

Just make sure you take advantage of domain name privacy (whois privacy or private whois). This protects your identity as the domain owner. Most people put their home address and their email address on the whois information and it makes it real easy to find you and your family.

Here are var!ux we are trying to simplify the web. Web design, web hosting, and web applications can be very confusing if you don’t have someone on your side to help make it easy. If you have your hosting with us, you can call us any time to get answers to your questions. If you don’t have your websites hosted with us, what are you waiting for? Go to www.variux.com/support to get started!

How-to: Secure your Traffic using an SSH Tunnel with PuTTY

David Edmonson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:26:35 +0000

Here is the quick and simple way to encrypt and protect what you are sending and receiving over the network whether you are at home or at a wifi hotspot. This is a simple proxy over an SSH connection. You will need the following to do this (works for any platform):

PuTTY for your platform
A server that supports SSH (either set up at home or your web host)

That’s it! First set up PuTTY to connect to your SSH server but also set the following Tunnel settings:

Source Port: 7070 (this number can be pretty much anything)
Destination: localhost
Select Dynamic and Auto

Then click Add and it should show up as D7070. Select Open and log-in. Your traffic can now be forwarded once you configure your applications to use the proxy.

In Firefox (all major version), go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings and set the following proxy configuration:

Manual proxy config
SOCKS Host: localhost
Port: 7070

Then hit OK and you’re done. To make sure the proxy is working, you can go to http://www.whatismyip.org/.

An easy way to switch proxy settings in Firefox is to install the QuickProxy add-on — change proxy settings with just a click.

support

David Edmonson — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:25:04 +0000