Blogs

NFS was developed at a time when we weren’t able to share our drives like we are able to today - in the Windows environment. It offers the ability to share the hard disk space of a big server with many smaller clients. Again, this is a client/server environment. While this seems like a standard service to offer, it was not always like this. In the past, clients and servers were unable to share their disk space.

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The basics for any network based on *nix hosts is the Transport Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) combination of three protocols. This combination consists of the Internet Protocol (IP),Transport Control Protocol (TCP), and Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP).

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Claws Mail is an email client (and news reader), based on GTK+.The appearance and interface are designed to befamiliar to new users coming from other popular email clients, as well as experienced users.

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vsftpd is a GPL licensed FTP server for UNIX systems, including Linux. It is secure and extremely fast. It is stable. Don’t take my word for it, though. Below, we will see evidence supporting all three assertions. We will also see a ist of a few important sites which are happily using vsftpd. This demonstrates vsftpd is a mature and trusted solution. vsftpd is an FTP server, or daemon. The “vs” stands for Very Secure.

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Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.

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Below are some basic guidelines on setting up new hosting servers. This is only a point of reference to begin with and you should know what you are doing, else it is highly advisable to get an expert to work on setting up and securing the server:

Synopsis:

• Scan server with tools such as netstat, nmap, nessus etc...
  
• Disable services not required.
  
• Remove packages not required.
  
• Update all other packages.
  
• Secure Incoming and Outgoing ports.
  
• Move SSH to a different port and disable direct root login.
  
• Enable Antidos and BruteForce Detection.
  
• Scan for rootkits and setup daily reporting.
  
• Secure tmp and tmpfs.
  
• Secure binaries, paths and profiles.
  
• Secure Apache and PHP, and cofigure to expose minimum info about the applications used.
  
• Secure Ftp via TLS/SSL connection.
  
• ...

Munin” means “memory”.Munin the tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort. Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, and quite possibly applications as well. It makes it easy to determine “what’s different today” when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you’re doing

This is how I got host networking for VirtualBox and have it setup to use bridging on FedoraCore 6 host. This allows for two way traffic between the host and the guest. You will need bridge-utils and uml-utilities.

The first step is to configure the host with a bridge and a tap device. With this only the bridge will get an IP address and not the ethX nor the tapX device.

I am using dhcp to assign the IP addresses so the basic commands on the host are as below and can be put in the rc.local file for it to come up on boot:

You should now be able to use host networking in VirtualBox, just change "attached to" to "host interface" and add the interface name of "tap0" in your networking settings for the guest.

Notes:

If you're using a firewall on your host, make sure to turn it off when testing network setup.
I have had success with using APF as firewall which seems compatible with bridging.

References:

1. VirtualBox
   
2. Bridge
   
3. uml-utilities
   
4. 2.6.6 UML setup

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

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Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation. Started as a fork of the browser component (Navigator) of the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, stewarded by the Mozilla Foundation and a large community of external contributors.

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