My web wanderings

Two articles I need to read and put into practice.
CLI Magic: rsync for backups
CLI Magic: rsnapshot

Article #1
Article #2
Article #3

The Ten Commandments of system administration, part I

Part 1. Backups!!

An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting
By: Mendel Cooper

Creating Images Of Your Linux System - SystemImager

This is a nice app I want to look at for deploying images of linux servers and desktops.

How to Set Up a Jabber Server LG #112 by Suramya Tomar
This is a great article to help us complete our internal Jabber Server.

Syncing the Treo 650 with Bluetooth | Linux Journal
By Dovid Kopel on Thu, 2005-03-24 00:00.
The new Treo smartphone is GNU/Linux compatible and comes with Bluetooth connectivity–here’s how you can set it up for your network.

Pocket Workstation - Debian on Handhelds

Kerry Garrison - Building your own PBX
Building Your Own PBX with Asterisk
Kerry Garrison
What would it mean to you to have your own full-featured PBX system at your home or small office? What would it mean to you if you could build an entire PBX system (minus the phones) on hardware you probably have laying around, AND that it can probably also save you money on your phone bill? Sounds too hard to believe doesn’t it, but using old hardware and some open source software, you really can build a commercial quality phone system that would normally cost thousands of dollars.

The Hardware
As I mentioned in the opening, we are going to build our PBX system from equipment that we have laying around the house. After cannibalizing three spare systems, what was left was a PII 450, 386mb RAM, 12gb HD, 48x CDROM drive, and an Intel Pro 10/100 network card. This is all you “need” to get going as long as you are going to get VOIP dial tone service from a company like BroadVoice (more on this later). If you want to use regular analog phone lines you will need modem card. Not every card will work properly, however, the most recommended card is the Digium Wildcard X100P FXO card which can be purchased brand new on eBay for $6.95 each. So far, total out of pocket expense for the card plus shipping: $12.90.

By Erik Inge Bolso on Tue, 2005-03-01 00:00.

Keeping directories in sync on multiple machines can be difficult. Running Unison is one way to make the task easier.

Unison is a file-synchronization tool that runs on Linux, UNIX and Microsoft Windows. Those of you who’ve used IBM Lotus Notes or Intellisync Mobile Suite probably have an idea of what synchronization is good for, as compared to one-way mirroring options such as rsync. You might have mirrored a company document directory to your laptop, for example, and then modified a document or two. Other people might have modified other documents in the same directory by the time you get back. With rsync, you’d need to reconcile the differences between the two directories manually or risk overwriting someone’s changes. Unison can sort out what has changed where, propagate the changed files and even merge different changes to the same file if you tell it how.

Full article

Peeking Into Google
Peeking Into Google
By Susan Kuchinskas

BURLINGAME, Calif. — The key to the speed and reliability of Google (Quote, Chart) search is cutting up data into chunks, its top engineer said.

Urs Hoelzle, Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering, offered a rare behind-the-scenes tour of Google’s architecture on Wednesday. Hoelzle spoke here at EclipseCon 2005, a conference on the open source, extensible platform for software tools.

Here is an article on Filesystem integrety checkers. There are several filesystem integrity checker applications, both commercial and open source. I chose to deploy afick, because it is written in Perl, which makes it lightweight and easily portable between different operating systems. Though by nature designed for the command line, afick also has an optional Webmin module and a graphical interface written in perl-Tk.

Here is an article on Filesystem integrety checkers. There are several filesystem integrity checker applications, both commercial and open source. I chose to deploy afick, because it is written in Perl, which makes it lightweight and easily portable between different operating systems. Though by nature designed for the command line, afick also has an optional Webmin module and a graphical interface written in perl-Tk.

Here is an ONLamp article that is interesting. “By recording performance metrics, web server administrators can have a historical record of how the server handled incoming HTTP requests. This article expands on that concept by adding a couple of logging directives and recording the logging data directly in a MySQL database.”

RTG: Real Traffic Grabber
RTG is a flexible, scalable, high-performance SNMP statistics monitoring system. It is designed for enterprises and service providers who need to collect time-series SNMP data from a large number of targets quickly. All collected data is inserted into a relational database that provides a common interface for applications to generate complex queries and reports. RTG includes utilities that generate configuration and target files, traffic reports, 95th percentile reports and graphical data plots. These utilities may be used to produce a web-based interface to the data.

Considering the capabilities of Samba 3 and what they could mean for your workplace network.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8069

First off I always recommend a complete format for any machine that has been infected with any virus, worm or trojan. Basically if your computer has been compromised then treat it as so and start over to be safe. That being said you probably want your data off your computer prior to formating it. Now don’t just go copying data off the infected windows computer to another windows computer. You are likely to just spread the infection. So here is an excellent article on how to clean the data using Knoppix prior to moving it to another computer.

Note to self. When installing Debian Sarge on VMware Workstation make sure to use IDE virtual disks not SCSI.

Build an Open Source Network Sniffer
This article reviews common issues of wireless security, and shows how to use open source software to suss out wireless networks, get information about them, and start recognizing common security problems. You will learn how build a lightweight wireless sniffer that runs on open source software and see how simple it is to interact with wireless networks

freshmeat.net: Project details for LinkChecker
With LinkChecker, you can check HTML documents for broken links. It features recursion, robots.txt exclusion protocol support, HTTP proxy support, i18n support, multithreading, regular expression filtering rules for links, and user/password checking for authorized pages. Output can be colored or normal text, HTML, SQL, CSV, or a sitemap graph in GML or XML format. Supported link types are HTTP/1.1 and 1.0, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Gopher, Telnet, and local files.