Link: linux-dash: Monitors “Linux Server Performance” Remotely Using Web Browser

If you are looking for a low resource, speedy server statistics monitoring script, look no further than linux-dash. Linux Dash’s claim to popular is its slick and responsive web dashboard that works better on large and small screens.

linux dash is a memory efficient, low resource, easy to install, server statistics monitoring script written in PHP. The web statistics page allows you to drag and drop the various widgets and rearrange the display as you desire. The script displays live statistics of your server, including RAM, CPU, Disk Space, Network Information, Installed Software’s, Running Processes and much more.

Full article here:
linux-dash: Monitors “Linux Server Performance” Remotely Using Web Browser (Tecmint)

Link: How to Turn Your Raspberry Pi into a File Server Using Samba

Back in the 1990s, Microsoft developed a protocol that allows one Windows machine to access the files and folders on another Windows machine. The protocol, which is known as the Common Internet File System (CIFS) – but was originally called Server Message Block (SMB), has been implemented on other operating systems including Linux. The most popular implementation is known as Samba and it allows devices like the Raspberry Pi to act as a CIFS file server. To put it another way, it allows a Windows PC to mount a folder on a Raspberry Pi and then copy, delete, read and write files on the it.

Installing and configuring Samba on a Raspberry Pi for basic file sharing is quite simple. …

Full article here:
How to Turn Your Raspberry Pi into a File Server Using Samba (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Setting Up A Linux File Server Using Samba

A quick Google will show many ways to to setup a Linux file server running Samba, most of them however don’t work! Some leave out important bits leaving you stuck and some will only work with one version of a specific Distro (but of course don’t mention this). I struggled for ages getting Samba to work reliably and made quite a few wrong turns on the way. I was just trying to set up a simple Linux file server to store music, photos etc. but eventually found a foolproof (probably) way to do it. The following works and has been tested several times on fresh installations. This is not meant to be a high security setup, all folders are accessible to everybody for read, write and delete. If you have stroppy teenagers who want exclusive access to their own area on the server, then you can use this as a starting point. A few simple changes would achieve that level of security but it is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Full article here:
Setting Up A Linux File Server Using Samba (HowTo Forge)

Link: arkOS: Building the anti-cloud (on a Raspberry Pi)

arkOS is an open source project designed to let its users take control of their personal data and make running a home server as easy as using a PC

…..

arkOS is not a solution to the surveillance state, but it does offer an alternative to those who would rather exercise some measure of control over their data and, at the very least, not lock away their information in online services where its retrieval and use is at the whim of a corporation, not the user.

Full article here:
arkOS: Building the anti-cloud (on a Raspberry Pi) (TechWorld)
Related article:
arkOS aims to let anyone host their own cloud with a $35 Raspberry Pi (Liliputing)

Link: Raspberry Pi: the Perfect Home Server

Ever since the announcement of the Raspberry Pi, sites all across the Internet have offered lots of interesting and challenging uses for this exciting device. Although all of those ideas are great, the most obvious and perhaps least glamorous use for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is creating your perfect home server.

If you’ve got several different computers in need of a consistent and automated backup strategy, the RPi can do that. If you have music and video you’d like to be able to access from almost any screen in the house, the RPi can make that happen too. Maybe you have a printer or two you’d like to share with everyone easily? The Raspberry Pi can fill all those needs with a minimal investment in hardware and time.

Full article here:
Raspberry Pi: the Perfect Home Server (Linux Journal)

Featured site: Raspberry Web Server – A web site on a Raspberry Pi cluster

Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a home web server is a great way to learn about web design and server administration. A Raspberry Pi uses much less power than a PC, and takes up much less space. The fully featured Linux operating system comes with lots of software, including the Apache web server which is used to host some of the world’s biggest web sites.

Visit the site:
Raspberry Web Server

Disaster recovery with MondoRescue

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.
The Great Desktop Fire
Image by mattbraga via Flickr

Many of us face the problem of having a server that we know we should backup frequently, but we don’t do it because it’s either too difficult to figure out how, or the backup solutions offered don’t actually restore the entire system if it crashes, so we figure, “why bother?”  If your system crashes, the thing you really need is a way to restore the entire system from some recent point in time.

Well, here’s one possible solution for you, assuming your server runs some form of Linux, and it’s from the fine folks at Sunshine Networks in Brisbane, Australia. I refer you to their article:

Disaster Recovery with Elastix 2.0

Now, don’t let the title throw you – there’s nothing Elastix-specific in this article.  The instructions should work with just about anything running under the CentOS operating system, and with minor tweaks to the installation process, under other versions of Linux.  What this software is supposed to do is give you an ISO file that can be burned to CD’s or DVD’s, or stored on a network share on another machine.  If the worst happens, you fix the hardware problems and then reinstall from the ISO file, and the way it’s supposed to work is that you get back to exactly where you were at the time of the last backup.  Now, I haven’t personally ever had to attempt a restore, but apparently others have and consider this a great piece of software. Obviously, I’m not making any guarantees, but it’s got to be better than no backup at all, right?

EDIT: Since I originally wrote this article, I’ve actually had the opportunity to use MondoRescue to restore a failed system (in this particular case, one that runs on a virtual machine). To say it worked great is an understatement. You just boot from the .iso file and it installs EVERYTHING back as it was. The only issue I had was that it couldn’t communicate with the network because the name of the network adapter was apparently different on the original and new systems — once I reconfigured the network settings to select a valid adapter (eth0, for example) it appeared to work just as it had on the day of the backup. And the restore process was surprisingly fast (much faster than the original installation, in fact)! Of course I cannot guarantee it will work that well for you, but I was blown away by the speed of the restoration, and I’m not that easily impressed!

I must also note that the article on the original Sunshine Networks site seems to have disappeared, so I changed the link to point to an archived copy on the Wayback Machine. However, in case that fails at some point, here is how I installed MondoRescue. Their instructions gave three different ways to do it, and I used this one, which (with perhaps a change in the file used) should work on any Red Hat or Centos based system (this was noted as “Tested on Elastix 2.0 32-bit” — if you are running something else, don’t just follow these instructions because you may need a different file):

cd /root/
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
yum install mondo

after mondo installed correctly, you should disable the RPMForge repository, just to be on the safe side :
nano /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo
change “enabled = 1” to “enabled = 0”

(They used vi to edit the repository; I changed it to nano. Use whichever text editor you like).

However, the file shown here is probably NOT the right one for your system. So, first go to http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/ and read the descriptions for each file, and be careful to select the right one for your system, and substitute that filename in the two lines where it is used above.

After installation, you can start the program by running /usr/sbin/mondoarchive, which will bring up a GUI (of sorts). The original article notes that:

your full iso will ( under default settings ) be created in the following directory :
/var/cache/mondo/mondorescue-1.iso
there is a small recovery CD here :
/var/cache/mindi/mondorescue.iso

END OF EDIT.

The article has you use the mondoarchive GUI to make the backups (well, they actually say mondorescue, but when I downloaded the software the program was called mondoarchive), and that’s fine to start with.  But eventually, you’re going to want to automate the process so you can use it in a cron job to do unattended scheduled backups on a regular basis.  I have this running on one machine and send copies of the backups to another, like this (cut and paste from this article to get the full lines without wrapping) :

#!/bin/bash
mondoarchive -OVi -d "/var/cache/mondo" -E "/asterisk_backup" -N -9 -G -s 4G
ssh myaccount@server2.net rm /home/myaccount/server1backup/mondo/mondorescue-1-old.iso
ssh myaccount@server2.net mv /home/myaccount/server1backup/mondo/mondorescue-1.iso /home/myaccount/server1backup/mondo/mondorescue-1-old.iso
scp /var/cache/mondo/mondorescue-1.iso myaccount@server2.net:~/server1backup/mondo
ssh myaccount@server2.net rm /home/myaccount/server1backup/mindi/mondorescue-old.iso
ssh myaccount@server2.net mv /home/myaccount/server1backup/mindi/mondorescue.iso /home/myaccount/server1backup/mindi/mondorescue-old.iso
scp /var/cache/mindi/mondorescue.iso myaccount@server2.net:~/server1backup/mindi

The first line calls the mondoarchive program to create the backup – the -E argument excludes any directories you don’t wish to back up (I have a directory of backups made using another method that I didn’t want backed up) and you can read about the other arguments in the documentation (also see the full HOWTO).  The remaining lines connect to the external server and delete the oldest backups, rename the previous backup, and then copy the new backups over.  To do it the way I’ve done it here, you must have ssh access to the other server and you must be able to connect without using a password, using public/private key authentication.  You may also have to log into the remote server and create the directories (/home/myaccount/server1backup/mindi/ and /home/myaccount/server1backup/mindi/ in this example – obviously you can call the directories whatever you wish, it’s entirely up to you).

There is, of course, more than one way to remove the pelt from a deceased feline, and you’ll probably have your own method for moving the files to another server.  In some situations it appears that MondoRescue could do it for you (look at the n option), but it doesn’t include a provision to remove the oldest file and rename the previous one (not that I could see, anyway), so that’s why I did it in a shell script.

The folks at Sunshine Networks have several other great how-tos – you might want to give them a look! And for more useful information on MondoRescue, particularly how to perform a restore, see Configure IT Quick: Use Mondo Rescue to back up Linux servers (but please realize that article was written in 2003, and the install has apparently been made less complicated since then, so don’t use their installation instructions).

Related Articles:
How to Clone/Backup Linux Systems Using – Mondo Rescue Disaster Recovery Tool (TecMint.com)
Redo Backup and Recovery Tool to Backup and Restore Linux Systems (TecMint.com)