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,…
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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…
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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,…
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afp on Linux via Bonjour
Based on a few messages I got after the article on building netatalk to host afp on Linux, it looks like building netatalk to host your shares just isn’t enough. I guess people still like Bonjour or something… In that case, let’s make this netatalk thingie announce itself to the world (er, your local network)! Avahi is much simpler than netatalk, given that there’s none of this dhx nonsense preventing us from using aptitude (again, this whole thing is for Debian/Ubuntu and you’re gonna’ need to escalate those privileges): aptitude install avahi-daemon Then we’re gonna’ need to teach it about the whole afpd service we built, which is done in…
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Server Admin on Linux
Apple recently announced the end of the Apple Xserve. The data center is a funny thing, and being such rack space is critical to most who spend a lot of time there. Many of the previous Xserve customers will continue to buy Mac Pro’s and use them in racks as tall Xserves. Others will purchase Mac Mini’s and use them for certain situations. But many will move on to using the same iron in the data center that they use for everything else, finding a way to duplicate or replace the functionality that was previously in the Xserve with something else. Server Admin is not going to run on Linux.…
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Checking Free Space in vSphere
Most of us will be familiar with the df command. But in ESX, you use the vdf command, located in /usr/sbin. Running the vdf command will net you similar output to what you see with df. Simply run the following to see free space on each of your disks: vdf -h You can also list all of your data stores to correlate the vdf output with esxcfg: /usr/sbin/esxcfg-scsidevs -c Or to list LUNs: /usr/sbin/esxcfg-mpath -L BTW, if you’re running out of free space, in my experience, first look to your snapshots and check how much space they’re consuming…
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Resetting a WordPress Password
Sometimes you can bite yourself a little when you experiment around with things. I installed a security plug-in and the next thing you know I couldn’t log into my own website. Ouch. Not a huge deal as it actually led to experimentation with the MySQL tables for WordPress, which oddly enough, I’ve typically just left well enough alone. But this I figured was gonna’ need to be updated eventually (although I relished the opportunity to get caught up on some stuff in the meantime). So first up, SSH into your box. Then fire up mysql: mysql -u root -p Turns out there’s a wp_users table in there. For my user…
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SCALE 8
The 8th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is being held at the Westin by LAX in Los Angeles this weekend. It starts today (so I should have posted this sooner) and sports sessions on open source topics ranging from Zenoss to Sugar to Fedora. For more on the schedule check out the conference schedule at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale8x/conference-schedule-feb-19-2010. This is one of those conferences that I’ve had to miss the last couple of years. But prior to that I was at the first few. The topics were mostly technical in nature, other than me the speakers/conference faculty were all top notch and the organization of the show is impressive. Given all…
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Cross Platform Screen Sharing: TiffanyScreens
Sure, you can screen share using ARD – but to Windows? TiffanyScreens is a little application that can run on Mac, Windows or Linux. It allows you to share your screen to a number of client systems, very useful with presentation broadcasting, training and standard screen sharing. I’ve tested in my lab with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard and must say that I’m impressed by how well it shares screens and how zippy it is over my AirPort network. Nice little app that deserves a plug: http://www.tiffanyscreens.com
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Piping Commands
The pipe (|) character is used to combine multiple commands. A pipe is a temporary storage place where the output of one command is stored and then passed as the input for a second command. Pipes are used to run more than two commands from the same command line. The sort command is used to sort data. When you run the ls –l command, you will see a listing of the files in a directory with each file shown on a separate line. When you use a pipe after the command and then sort your results, you will sort the data listed on the screen by the list command. The…