… mammoth cave …
I\’ve been fighting today with Apache2 and mod_auth_pam which didn\’t want to go well with me. Finally I found this nice post which gave me almost full solution. The only thing to do is to give apache somehow access to read /etc/shadow (for example by chgrp apache /etc/shadow && chmod g+r /etc/shadow).
If you have some better ideas on how to make apache 2 to authorize system users, you are welcome :)
Recently I borrowed an IBM ThinkPad 390X for doing some small perl-for-web stuff on it. It is quite an old model with 500MHz CPU, 64MB of RAM and 11 GB of HDD. I added some more RAM so now I have 64+128 MB and this was the max I could do to improve the machine.
I have installed the Fedora Core 4 (custom install), booted up and started to look for some X window manager to work with, because I do not really like gnome a lot and KDE was a bit luggy. After looking on enlightenment, afterstep, fluxbox, FVWM and IceWM and stopped on the last one since it was fast, easy to set up, quite customizable, but not complicated. Since I really like some fancy stuff, I needed some nice terminal emulator which can support transparency, unicode and have tabs (although the last one is not so important, I really like when terminals do have such a feature). Looking here and there I tried many existing products including xterm, eterm, aterm, rxvt, mrxvt, konsole and gnome-terminal. All of these were either heavy or did not work as I wanted them to. Finally I found a project called \”Terminal\” which was an attempt to create something similar to gnome-terminal, but lighter and which would not require you to install the Gnome at all. I would say this is an amazing piece of work. I has all of the features I need, it is fast (a bit slower than xterm, but much faster than my default emulator konsole [from KDE]) and it is quite customizable as well so after 3 minutes of working around I almost didn\’t feel the difference between it and konsole I used to.
Next task was to find browser and email reader. For browsing I tried mozilla, firefox, dillo and links (with -g for X). I stopped on using firefox (the 1.5 is pretty fast) and links -g for for viewing my ebooks (which are in HTML). For emails I usually use kmail (or kontact package with all it\’s benefits) but it was too heavy to use it here so I decided to use thunderbird. I could also use mutt, but since all my mail is on two IMAP servers and I wanted to have it offline synchronized as well, I went to thunderbird which can do this job out-of-the-box instead of spending lots of time on setting offlineIMAP stuff and then binding mutt to it.
The only small part of the software I am missing now is some light office suite which can work with M$ Office files in the same good way OpenOffice.org can, so I am still using OpenOffice.org which is a bit heavy for my hardware and it takes it almost a minute to start up and then another half of it to load the document I need.
Anyway, I am very glad to see such a good working station for me, especially after noticing the label \”designed for M$ Win 98\” and imagining what I would do on the default OS coming with this laptop :)
I am in the process of upgrading (actually replacing) the server now. The old one is full and overloaded as well as outdated and has lots of misconfiguration since it was my first ever production server setup (so I didn\’t know much about things I was actually doing) and then I didn\’t have much time to fix things up.
Since I got a new HP Compaq ML110 (G3) machine I started to slowly moving to it. Hopefully I will finish with the transfer in a week and things will get much better.
Job Done:
To Be Done:
Improvements:
to be continued…
While browsing through the Fedora website I\’ve noticed a couple of changes that look like more adaption of distribution to russian language.
I am not using russian a lot and I prefer to read release notes in english as well as there is not too much need for russian spell-check for me since I am not writing a lot russian texts, but on the other side, I know a lot of people who really want it and need it so I think these improvements will make even more people get and try/use the distro.
I am seeking an opinion on how to set up 2 internet connections the best way. What I have is a LAN of around 45 workstations and around 10 servers which serve the LAN as well as Mail, Citrix and VPN connections to WAN. The internet connections are: ADSL 1MBit/128KBit and ADSL 1.5MBit/256KBit.
I have thought of 3 setups:
1. Put both connections to the same switch (through firewall). Setup up the weak line as a def. gateway for the LAN and the powerful one as a def. gateway to the servers. This way servers will have begger channel for serving WAN with all the stuff.
2. Put each connection on a separate switch, connect LAN to the switch with weak connection, add second ethernet for each server add connect each of the servers to each of the switches. This way LAN will be accessing WAN through the weak line and servers through the separate servers\’ ethernet while servers will have second ethernet to serve WAN through the big channel. This makes me feel like I will reduce traffic on the LAN since WAN serving will be done through the separate ethernets and also I will have more accessability to the servers since they have 2 ethernets each.
3. Do the 2 and then make a failover between firewalls on both internet connections so that in case one of the lines goes down, the second line will be used by both: servers and LAN.
I am new to setting 2 internet connections, but knowing that there are a lot of people on the web who did it many times I am seeking comments, advice and whatever is applicable here.