This is a simple tutorial on how to install AWstats on Debian and configure it for displaying web statistics. I’ve tried this on lenny, but it should also work on other versions with small or no modifications. First, make sure your web server is configured to write access logs to combined format. This is default [...]

Nagios is a great monitoring software. This is how I get it working on debian lenny…

This is the way I set up BackupPC with lighttpd on lenny… Install package: apt-get install backuppc In this process, apt-get will automatically install apache2 package (if not already installed), but if you don’t need it, remove it with: apt-get remove apache2* apt-get autoremove Edit file /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and add “mod_cgi” to server.modules section. Add “default.cgi” [...]

Samba is a free implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol, which allows you file and printer sharing between windows and linux.

Sudo is a tool which allows users to execute specific commands as root (or another) user. Here’s how you can install it on Debian

rTorrent is a lightweight and stable torrent client with many functions. It can turn your old, cheap linux box into a powerful torrent download server.

First, you need an OS template. They are located in /var/lib/vz/template/cache/
Pre-created templates can be found here: http://wiki.openvz.org/Download/template/precreated
I will use debian-minimal template, but the same goes for others.

OpenVZ is a great open-source virtualization solution for linux. Because there is no emulation layer, just container isolation, its performance overhead is near zero. Here are the steps I used to get it working on Debian Lenny.

To change ip address configuration, you need to edit file /etc/network/configuration
…

RAID 1 (Mirroring) is a great solution for preserving data integrity. If one disk fails, data will still remain on the second disk.
Although hardware RAID is a better solution in most cases, software RAID has a few advantages: it doesn’t require additional hardware, and disks can have different sizes.