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Below is a collection of commands for mdadm that I have found useful. Use these at your own risk. Read more…

RAID, which stands for “redundant array of independent” disks provides a way to group disks into one volume and/or provide fault tolerance. There are three way to implement RAID: hardware, a combination of hardware/software, and software only. Read more…

I like to test all the possible scenarios before putting a server into production. One of these tests was whether I could reinstall linux without disturbing the RAID arrays. Unfortunately the Debian and Ubuntu installers do not make this easy. When you reach the partitioning stage it will just show you the physical drives with the linux raid partitions and not the md devices. Here are the steps that worked for me. Read more…

Apache’s suexec module is useful for running CGI and SSI scripts as a defined user. However all scripts must be located under the compiled in docroot and the uid/gid of the user running the script must match the script’s uid/gid.

This can be a problem if you have a shared CGI app like awstats as unless you make each user a copy the uid/gid will not match. Not to mention that the docroot on Fedora is /var/www so if you want to store your virtual hosts elsewhere your out of luck. Not to worry recompiling apache isn’t as hard as you might think. Read more…

A common practice is to use one apache server to host websites for multiple domain names. Apache supports virtual servers out of the box making this easy to setup. This tutorial is based on Fedora Core 5, but should apply to most other linux distros. Read more…

Sending a banner is a good way to let system users know what the expectations are. Configuring the banner for vsFTPd is an easy process involving two files. The file containing the banner must have the same name as the daemon. In this tutorial I store the banner in /etc/banners, but feel free to store it elsewhere. Read more…

There is a good amount of information on setting up a reverse proxy with apache. One of the better articles I came across was on Apache Week. The downfall to these articles is that most reference ProxyHTMLURLMap, part of the mod_proxy_html module, which is not included in the httpd rpm with Fedora Core. Read more…