Free Linux Tutorials

I had the chance to work as a systems administrator in an e-commerce company and they have Linux dedicated servers leased/purchase from a hosting provider.
Dedicated servers compared to a shared hosting is you have full control of the box. You can do whatever you want with the box, implement services and of course a full root access with the machine.

With this company, we are hosting about 200+ websites and some of them are hosted in our  boxes run in Redhat Enterprise Linux. As part of administering the box is to have a full and incremental backup of our dynamic website files and database. Scheduled shell scripts are set on this machine and luckily, I was able to find one of the useful backup solution script that can be found in this site:

In this tutorial, we will be cloning PC desktop machines using an opensource tool called “G4U”.

g4u (“ghosting for unix”) is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. more details on –>   http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

The procedure below was tested successfully on CentOS.  The same thing was also implemented on my BSD box and works as well.

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on Unix and Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Here are the steps in installing AWstats on Apache Web Server as your web log analyzer and statistics:

STEPS:

Assuming VirtualHost setting is already added on the httpd.conf, and the log is customized already for a combined log.

Example:
#<VirtualHost support.freelinuxtutorials.com:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@support.freelinuxtutorials.com
DocumentRoot /home/www/support.freelinuxtutorials.com
ServerName support.freelinuxtutorials.com
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/support.freelinuxtutorials.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/support.freelinuxtutorials.com-combined_log combined

If not httpd.conf should be modified to customized the log of a particular website

CustomLog /yourlogpath/yourlogfile common
to
CustomLog /yourlogpath/yourlogfile combined

1.    Download the latest stable awstats.tar.gz  from the internet

#cd /usr/local/
#wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/awstats/awstats-6.7.tar.gz

2.    Uncompress the tarball file and rename the directory to awstats

* Setting up ftp via vsftpd in linux

The VSFTPD (Very Secure FTP Server Deamon) is one of the most commonly used FTP servers under Linux and comes with most Linux distributions.

This article will help you install and configure vsftpd in Linux. (sample OS used is a Red-hat based distribution)

GOALS:

* to create a secure ftp server
* to create an ftp user chrooted or jailed in a certain directory (sample use is an apache directory wherein you can limit users or your developers to just upload to a restricted folder)

This is the list of commonly used commands in systems administration.

Clocks
hwclock Manage hardware clock.
netdate Set clock according to host’s clock.
rdate Manage time server.
zdump Print list of time zones.
zic Create time conversion information files.

Host Information
arch Print machine architecture.
dnsdomainname Print DNS domain name.
domainname Print NIS domain name.
free Print memory usage.
host Print host and zone information.
hostname Print or set hostname.
nslookup Query Internet domain name servers.
uname Print host information.

These commands will work with most (if not all) distributions of Linux as well as most (?) implementations of Unix.

Communication
ftp – File Transfer Protocol.
login – Sign on.
rlogin – Sign on to remote system.
rsh – Run shell or single command on remote system.
talk -Exchange messages interactively with other terminals.
telnet – Connect to another system.
tftp – Trivial file transfer protocol.

Comparisons

cmp – Compare two files, byte by byte.
comm – Compare items in two sorted files.
diff – Compare two files, line by line.
diff3 – Compare three files.