Here's another one of our famous 5 minute install guides. This one is for Centos 5.6 and WolfCMS (aka FrogCMS) version 0.75.

Once again this assumes a clean install of CentOS 5, with nothing else on the box. If your setup is slightly different you will need to make allowances.

Install our pre requisites

# Install the necessary software
yum install -y httpd mysql-server php53 php53-mysql wget
# Turn on the Services
chkconfig httpd on
chkconfig mysqld on
# Start the services
service httpd start
service mysqld start

Download WolfCMS and put the files in /var/www/html

cd /tmp ...

— Andrew

The recent high profile hack of Distribute.IT has been generating quite a lot of noise over the last few days amongst the Australian Internet industry. And we've received a few emails from our dedicated hosting customers wanting to know more about the details of the hack and how it could affect them.

The truth is, most of the details surrounding the "hack" are sketchy. But we do know:

• Four of Distribute.IT's shared hosting servers were involved,
• Comprising over 4,800 sites involved
• Offline, or otherwise logically separated backups were not available
• and all data, websites and ...

— Andrew

We are huge fans of OpenVZ container level virtualisation. Although we're quite puzzled as to why it is not more popular.

What is OpenVZ you ask?

OpenVZ is operating system-level virtualization based on a modified Linux kernel that allows a physical server to run multiple isolated instances known as containers, virtual private servers (VPS), or virtual environments (VE). The preferred term these days is container. Containers are sometimes compared to chroot or jail type environments but containers are really much better in terms of isolation, security, functionality, and resource management.

Why we use OpenVZ

In a nutshell: Because a ...

— Andrew

We're a big fan online file storage and replication services such as Dropbox, SpiderOak, or Ubuntu One. They enable mobile workers to collaborate, share files, work on the go and generally be more productive.

Due to security considerations (or data sovereignty laws) many of these services are not suitable for storing confidential or commercially sensitive material. Many of these services previously thought to be secure have now been shown to be insecure by design. (Hey Dropbox, almost a year ago, we noticed that you're using global dedupe across your customers files! When we added a common .iso file ...

— Andrew

Here is a quick run down of some major features and updates that we'll soon see in CentOS 6. (When it's finally released).

Filesystem & Storage:

• ext4 is now the default filesystem,
• LVM finally supports mergable snapshots - finally we can implement safe (transacted) file level replication using rsync.

Network:

• iSCSI support for root and /boot partitions

Kernel:

• Updated 'tickless' kernel - save power,
• Cgroups support for resource allocation amongst process group.

Web and applications:

• Apache 2.2
• MySQL 5.1.47
• PostgreSQL 8.4.4
• Memcached 1.4.4
• Ruby 1.8.7
• PHP 5.3.2
• Tomcat 6 / OpenJDK ...

— Andrew

If you're running FreeNAS 8 under VMware, Xen or KVM, then you'll probably want to disable ntpd. To do this you'll need to ssh into your FreeNAS box as root and run the following commands.

mount -uw /
vi /conf/base/etc/rc.conf

Change ntpd_enable="YES" to ntpd_enable="NO" and ntpd_sync_on_start="YES" to ntpd_sync_on_start="NO".

Then reboot and you should find that ntpd has been disabled. This should help eliminate any time jitter issues when running ntpd on a virtualised environment.

— Andrew

FreeNAS 8 runs nicely under Linux KVM virtualisation. But unlike FreeNAS 7, FreeNAS 8 is based on FreeBSD 8.2. This means that there are some configuration differences. The main one is the network device model type='ne2k_pci' does not seem to work for FreeBSD 8.2 or FreeNAS 8.

So if you're having trouble getting the networking to work, try using model type='rtl8139'. And you will need at least 1GB for the OS drive, otherwise the installation will fail silently.

Below is a working scripted install that we used on one of our lab computers to successfully ...

— Andrew

Today I found myself needing to extract all the page links from a website to ensure that when we restructured the site, all the old links were redirected to the new page locations and there we no nasty 404's.

So here I present, my "Quick and dirty website link extractor". Complete with gratuitous command piping, ready to run on any Linux box with the appropriate programs installed:

MYSITE='http://example.com';wget -nv -r --spider $MYSITE 2>&1 | egrep ' URL:' | awk '{print $3}' | sed "s@URL:${MYSITE}@@g"

Obviously you'll need to replace example.com with your own ...

— Andrew