Free Software Linux

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. Usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. This document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine.

http://www.howtoforge.com/virtual-hosting-with-vsftpd-and-mysql-on-debian-lenny

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Debian Lenny. I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

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In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Lenny server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected.

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This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun xVM VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless Debian Lenny server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

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The Debian Project is seeking a few GNOME lovers to help with a "massive cleanup in the insane amount of bugs submitted against GNOME packages." The Debian/GNOME Bug Weekend will be the last weekend of February, on the #debian-gnome channel on OFTC.

From the email to debian-devel-announce:

You don’t need any special skills. Just join #debian-gnome on the OFTC
IRC network, and we’ll provide all the guidance you need.

Since Apache is most of the time a memory hungy process, people started to look for different ways to host their website. Apache is clearly not the only webserver available. A few good examples are lighttpd and nginx. In this tutorial I will show you how to install nginx on your Ubuntu server. This tutorial also applies to Debian, though. There is only a very small difference.

http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-php-5.3-nginx-and-php-fpm-on-ubuntu-debian

Debian Etch is soon to be unsupported by the Debian team, therefore all Debian Linux Servers need to be upgraded to Debian Lenny. I have upgraded many Linux servers to Debian Lenny over the past months, so I am providing this guide on how to upgrade Debian Etch to Debian Lenny.

http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-upgrade-debian-etch-to-lenny

By using my Network Monitoring Appliance we noticed a link in MRTG always under heavy load. On this link a lot of different traffic aggregates, so we decided to analyze of what quantities of protocols and therefore applications the cumulative traffic consists.

http://www.howtoforge.com/trafficanalysis-using-debian-lenny

module-assistant is a tool for building Debian kernel modules from source, without having to rebuild the whole kernel. It fetches module-source packages that have been prepared for the Debian distribution via apt and produces .deb packages. This tutorial shows how to use module-assistant in command-line mode and in interactive mode.

http://www.howtoforge.com/building-kernel-modules-with-module-assistant-on-debian-lenny

Kinterbasdb 3.3.0 stable driver is included in Debian Squeeze (Testing) and Sid (Unstable)
Update : is now included in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
You can install it by a simple:
sudo apt-get install python-kinterbasdb

Damyan submited the patches to make Firebird 2.5 buildable on FreeBSD.
You can watch Debian building logs here

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Debian Lenny as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Debian Lenny). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

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Perhaps you will recall the Miserware power saving software I blogged about last year?

I’m still running it on all of my machines here and it has been great – I really don’t notice it at all. It just sits in the background and according to the logs is saving between ~20% & ~60% power consumption by my various CPUs. And that’s just what it should do.

FreeSWITCH is an open-source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow.

http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up-freeswitch-on-debian-5-lenny

Since my last blog post on the Nokia N900 I have been experimenting more with this Linux powered device and thought it was time to go a little further to see what it could do. Just over two years ago I wrote about using the Asus EEE PC as a “server in your handbag” running Apache 2, MySQL and PHP.