Archive for April 2008
I’ve been looking round for a small, simple helpdesk system that I can use for keep track of contact with my customers.
I want something that can create tickets via e-mail, something that’s easy to manage and, because I’m just starting out, something that’s free!
I’ve decided to give Trellis Desk from Accord5 a go. I’ve not seen it talked about much but it was pretty easy to install and looks really nice.
SSH is extremely versatile and can be used to both mange your server and copy files to your server. Unless you have a real good reason to be using FTP still you really shouldn’t be (and you certainly shouldn’t be using telnet any more!)
It’s certainly worth taking some time to make sure your SSH service is secure and there is plenty you can do to accomplish this.
Here’s what I do with my servers plus some links to other things that you can do.
1 - Make sure you are running the latest version of the SSH daemon software
2 - Install denyhosts
Denyhosts can be configured to stop accepting connections from IP addresses that have made too many failed login attempts. It is configurable so you can specify how many failed login attempts to allow before the host is blocked, how long the host is blocked for …
So, maybe everyone knows this already, but …
I’ve only just started started designing websites and found this useful site - http://browsershots.org/
It will show you what your website looks like when viewed in different browsers, on different platforms. It actually shows you a screen grab of the page.
Turns out IE5.5 doesn’t like my transparent png, nor does it like something in my stylesheet!
A friend of mine has recently launched his website selling jewelry in the UK - www.sanye.co.uk
Why not head on over and check it out and, maybe, buy someone something nice 
I have no shame in admitting that my graphic design skills are pretty poor!
When I needed a logo for my new system administration company I first had a go at designing it myself and really didn’t like the results. So, time to get a professional in.
I had heard about elance before - elance.com is a website where you can employ all kinds of freelance professionals for one off jobs. There are programmers, graphic artists, accountants, lawyers … I signed up and paid my $10 (refundable) deposit and started to have a look at what, and how, other people were asking for logos.
You basically create a “Project” that details all of your requirements. As I found out later on it pays to be quite specific when you are drawing up your requirements. Instead of just saying “Logo wanted …”, I had a pretty good idea what I wanted and tried to describe it as best as I could.
So, I finally finished the website for my fledgling system administration business - http://sysadminman.net/
Please let me know what you think!
Matt
We are currently in the process of migrating our users from one Active Directory domain to another.
The users already exist in the target domain so we were looking to mass change our NTFS permissions to include the user from the new domain whilst also retaining the permissions from the old domain.
A tool that Microsoft supplies looked ideal for the task - subinacl - apart from in one respect - the tool was deigned to replace permissions instead of adding to them. The way we got round this problem was to edit the export from subinacl and add in the new permissions that we wanted and then to run the export file against the NTFS volume.
So this was a 4 step process.
Continue reading ‘Modifying subinacl exports with a bash script’ »
Here are several areas you should consider when looking for a VPS - I’m sure there are others! Please let me know if you think of any and I’ll add them to the list
Memory: When I first started looking for a VPS I was shocked at how little memory you got. 256MB sounds like a ridiculous amount - however, you have to remember that a lot of the memory that the Linux kernel is using does not come out of your allocation. Also, programs these days expect there to be a lot of memory available on the server. If you’ve only got a small amount then you can tweak the configuration files (of apache, mysql, etc …) to use less memory. Sometimes this will degrade performance to an unacceptable level but often not.
Continue reading ‘What to consider when you’re looking for a VPS?’ »
Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) are two terms that describe the same thing - a share (or slice) of a physical server. VPS’s are becoming very popular amongst web hosters and developers who’s sites requirements are greater than a shared hosting supplier can provide, but do not yet demand their own dedicated server.
With shared hosting you get some web space that you can run your site on, however, problems can arise if your site is too busy (it can affect other users with that shared hosting provider) or, if the software that you want to run (mailserver, web blog, picture gallery, bulletin …) has certain requirements that a shared hosting provider does not provide.
Continue reading ‘What is a Virtual Private Server (VPS)?’ »
Thought I’d post a quick message about something that kept me busy for way too long!
If you get any permission errors while trying to setup Xen along the lines of …
then it may be worth checking if you’ve got selinux enabled. Check the file /etc/selinux/config and try changing
and reboot to see if that cures your problems. If it does then you can either leave selinux disabled (ensure you know the consequences of doing this) or grant the required permissions for selinux.
