Server Tutorials

Debian's package tools makes it easy to install and manage packages. For more complex tasks, however, tools are not as well-advertised. Here are five options worth checking out.

Have a long-running job you want to "detach" from the terminal? Don't use tmux or Screen? If you haven't started the job yet, nohup is an easy to use option, and if you must stop a job in the middle, there's disown.

No matter what the size is of your IT environment, issue tracking is a critical component of system administration. If you're looking for a simple issue tracking system that can be scaled as your shop grows, check out Roundup, an interesting solution that is easy to both test out and deploy.

Microsoft released a first beta of its upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 product to the MSDN community in early May. We took it out for a spin, and here's what we found.

DenyHosts makes it easy to ward off unauthorized SSH connection attempts. The utility blocks attempts to connect to your server via SSH after too many failed attempts or from a blacklisted host.

When your system is rooted, you can't trust most utilities to show processes from the rootkit. To identify the problem, check out unhide and unhide.rb.

The tail utility is one of the most useful admin tools, but it's limited and outdated. Bring your log-watching capabilities into the 21st century and view multiple logs at one time with MultiTail.

This Python app makes use of SSH to create a VPN between a Linux, BSD, or Mac OS X machine and a remote system that has SSH access and Python -- great for building a VPN on the fly.

Perl may not be glamorous, but its modules are often hard to avoid. Oftentimes, the standard CPAN shell makes using them more difficult than it needs to be. If that's the case for you, consider switching to CPAN Minus.

If you use git to collaborate, you probably also know about Gist, a Pastebin-type service from Github. But did you also know, that if you're a Vim user you can get even more out of it with the script Gist.vim?

Telnet remains a useful, albeit insecure, way to troubleshoot Linux-powered servers.

Data aficionados constantly on the lookout for better ways to display charts and graphs will appreciate CairoPlot, Python-based plotting software pretty enough to impress even the most jaded Mac user.

There are many options for online collaboration, but WebDAV remains a useful and straightforward way to share files. Software support at both the server and client ends sweetens the deal further.

If you're short on cash but looking for a server to test operating systems and virtual environments or a flexible machine capable of being quickly reconfigured for testing purposes, consider building your own. Here's how.

If you need to manage multiple sessions in the same terminal, consider Tmux, a handy "terminal multiplexer." This week, we take a look at its basic usage and configuration.

If you want the advantages of a local messaging server as well as those of cloud computing, it may be time to consider coexistence.

The less versatile of the two main high availability technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2, Network Load Balancing offers functionality that cannot be easily facilitated through other native OS means. This article examines its features and how to deploy it.