• Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  WordPress

    Get Your WordPress on with Ubuntu 10

    Setting up and installing WordPress is pretty straight forward. That’s not to say it’s not going to take a little work to go from 0 to 60 on a base Linux installation. But I’ll lay the work out for you so as not to be that tricky. Everything we’ll be doing will require elevated privileges, so sudo in front of each command or sudo bash before you get going. First up, install Apache, as you’ll need a web server. I think the base apache2 config is pretty straight forward out-of-the-box: apt-get install apache2 During installation you will be asked to type y to continue. Do that and it will finish…

  • Mac OS X

    Howto Install wget for Mac OS X

    The wget command is used to download files from the web and is one of the most useful commands around. But while it comes included with most distributions of Linux, it is not built into Mac OS X by default. Therefore, let’s look at installing wget. To get started, install the developer tools for Mac OS X so that you can get a working copy of a compiler (gcc). Once the developer tools have been installed, you’ll want to download the latest version of wget from gnu. To do so, either download it manually from http://www.gnu.org/software/wget or use the ftp command to do so for you: ftp ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-latest.tar.gz Next, extract…

  • cloud,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Programmatically Interacting with Google Apps

    There are a number of ways that you can interact with Google Apps: there is the website, the new Google Cloud Connect and an API that allows you to integrate Google Apps with your own solutions. The API is available for python and java and can take some time to get used to, even though Google has done a good job with making it pretty straight forward (comparably). Therefore, there are a couple of tools that ease the learning curve a bit. GoogleCL on Ubuntu The first, and easiest is GoogleCL. GoogleCL is a command line version of Google Apps that will allow you to interact with YouTube, Picasa, Blogger…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Troubleshooting StorNext Mounts in Linux

    StorNext and Xsan go pretty well together. I wrote up an article going on two years ago for Xsanity on setting up RedHat clients for Xsan environments at http://www.xsanity.com/article.php?story=2009011213072797&query=stornext. But I didn’t go into much detail on troubleshooting. There isn’t a ton, beyond the traditional steps you take in Mac OS X, when troubleshooting Xsan clients as there isn’t a lot that can go wrong. But, let’s look at how I normally proceed when I only have one volume that will not mount. The first step is to stop and then start up cvfs. To stop cvfs, run the following command: /etc/init.d/cvfs stop To then start it back up: /etc/init.d/cvfs…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Ubuntu and Firewalling

    Using the firewall in Ubuntu can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it. BSD variants all basically use the ipfw command whereas most of the rest of the *nix world will use netfilter. Netfilter has a number of front ends; the one that comes pre-installed in Ubuntu is ufw, short for ‘uncomplicated firewall’. Ufw is good for basic port management: allow and deny type of stuff. It’s not going to have the divert or throttling options. So let’s look at some basic incantations of ufw (you need to have elevated privileges to do all of this btw). Initial Configuration First you need to enable ufw,…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment,  Ubuntu

    NFS + Ubuntu + Mac OS X Clients = A Quickie

    NFS is an old standby in the *nix world. It seems that it’s about as old as the hills and while it can be cranky at times, it’s pretty easy to setup, manage and use. Once it’s configured, you use it in a similar fashion as you do in Mac OS X Server. The client configuration is identical. To get started, let’s install the nfs-kernel-server, nfs-common and portmap packages on our Ubuntu 10.04 box: apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap Then let’s create a directory to share (aka export): mkdir /Homes Then we need to define the permissions for /Homes (ends up similar in functionality to the export to option in…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Setting up DNS Services on Ubuntu

    On Sunday, I mentioned making your forward and reverse DNS entries match up. But I didn’t really discuss what to do if they don’t. For those readers moving into Ubuntu from Mac OS X Server, you’ll note that at installation time, if the hostname doesn’t match the A record and PTR for your server then it will install DNS and make them match up. The reason for this is that host names are a critical aspect in how many of the network services that modern services run. If you don’t have DNS or if you want to fire up DNS in the same manner that Mac OS X Server does…

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Installing Ubuntu 10 in Fusion

    I’ve done a number of articles on using Ubuntu 10 as a server recently, but haven’t actually looked at doing the base installation of an Ubuntu 10 host. In this example, I’ll look at using Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop. In many of the previous examples I’ve been looking at Ubuntu 10.10 Server; the reason I’m using 10.04 Desktop here is because I believe there is a smaller learning curve and that inherently Mac OS X Systems Administrators who might be following this thread actually like a GUI. There are a number of aspects of this type of setup that are simply not GUI oriented; however, the base OS can easily be,…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    QuickTime Streaming Server on Ubuntu 10

    OK, so you don’t necessarily call rtsp on Ubuntu QuickTime Streaming Server. Instead, you call it Darwin Streaming Server (DSS). But the end result is basically what you have exposed in Mac OS X Server, but running on Linux. You don’t have the same functionality in Server Admin, but it does work. And the key to what it does is use the rtsp protocol to stream supported files from the server to clients. It is a little tougher than just clicking on the start button, but too much tougher provided you follow these directions (thanks to the good folks of the DSS list that I’ve been a member of for…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Ubuntu Server 10 & Active Directory

    There are a number of different ways to join Linux systems into an Active Directory domain. One is to use winbind, a popular part of Samba often used for this purpose. However, having had success with the Likewise Open directory services plug-in for Mac I decided to give their Linux solution a shot as well. After all, it is free (as in beer). And I am glad I did (well, I wasn’t when I was using Ubuntu Server 10.10, but backing back down to 10.04 (which is LTS after all) made it all better. To get started, let’s run apt-get to grab and install the likewise-open package: apt-get -y install…