So your users need access to Exchange and data from outside your organisation. Sure you can set up RPC over HTTPS and various other tools to access the data. I just find OpenVPN very good, convenient and reliable.
And after battling to find a good simple HOWTO, I put this together. It’s a quick and nasty but it works!:)
Firstly, ensure you are root, and just in case the OpenVPN is not in the base repository, add the rpmforge repo (these steps you can find elsewhere).
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Recall that the reason for doing this Linux-Windows integration was to get the users of my Linux-based backup server to have web-based access to their files, from their Windows XP desktops.
I will not go into the details of configuring the BackupPC web interface. That’s extensively covered in the BackupPC documentation here.
Apache has an almost-annoyingly huge number of authentication mechanisms, but most people use password authentication based on an .htpasswd or .htaccess file. However, since all the users of my Linux-based backup system already had acounts on the ADS server, it seemed to make no sense to have to create a parallel authentication database for them. Not to think of the nightmare of synchronising the two databases when either or both change.
I’ll start by getting Apache to grant access only to users who authenticate on its host Linux box. Keep in mind though, that those users will actually be authenticating against an ADS database. This is made possible by PAM, and to make Apache authenticate using PAM, we must download and install the Apache mod_auth_pam module.
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July 2007 This how-to article is based on my experience setting up and maintaining a regular Ubuntu 7.04 install running as the backup server at UCSD. The clients varied in their OS’s; Mac OS X, Windows XP, Linux (Debian and Ubuntu). Except for the install commands (eg apt-get install), this instruction should work with other Linux distros.
Please click the OS that you use to see the specific instructions.
If you have Cygwin installed or are planning on getting it in the future, please use the link for Win XP with Cygwin. If you do not know what Cygwin is, most likely you don’t have it. However, if you would like to find out, click here to find out.
This manual is written for the administrator who will be setting up the backup server. You must have a root privilege. The server computer will be the computer that will do the backup and keep the backed up data.
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These instructions are provided in the hope that they’ll be useful to others. If you find them useful, please drop me a note: stephen [at] physics.unc.edu. Similarly, if you implement this setup on platforms other than Windows and wish to contribute your code (either under GPL, or transferring copyright to me) please do so.
One common problem plaguing IT professionals is how to backup data on laptops and other mobile devices. There is considerable value in mobile data, but many users seldom, if ever, bring their laptops back to the corporate or academic campus where it may be regularly backed up.
BackupPC is an excellent open-source product for backing up computers. It excels at backing up desktops and servers, but laptops (as moving targets) are especially difficult. By default, BackupPC can be configured to wake up periodically, say hourly, and look for laptops that have appeared on the network. This is not without issues (some of which can be worked around), but these are compounded when laptops do not have static IP addresses.
A better solution is to allow users to backup valuable data on the laptops on-demand. This page details my solution to do this.
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Author: Cody Dunne
Last Edited: 12/06/2008
Most of this guide is not original work, and is based substantially on the numerous sources available online for these tools. It does, however, combine many of the disparate sources for this information, add some of my own experience and insights, and provides an excellent backup scheme for Windows XP/Vista clients. Hopefully it will help other users in this process and prevent them from spending as much time getting it working as I did.
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Last modified on:
12-15-2008 – Created.
By: MaxHetrick
This guide will assist you in setting up BackupPC using the CentOS RPMs in the CentOS testing repository. It will not go into detailed explanations of all the possible BackupPC configurations. It will also assume that you’re setting up BackupPC to do backups across rsync. BackupPC is capable of archive, tar, smb, and rsyncd backups, but this guide will concentrate only rsync to other Linux hosts. BackupPC is heavily documented when it comes to configuration options, and the guide is present in the web interface. Also, BackupPC should reside on it’s own server, because Apache must be run as the BackupPC user created on the system which could affect regular webserver things.
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RAID devices can be partitioned, like ordinary disks can. This can be a real benefit on systems where one wants to run, for example, two disks in a RAID-1, but divide the system onto multiple different filesystems:
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Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Last edited 01/15/2009
This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on a CentOS 5.2 system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver – in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!
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Version 1.0
Author: Andrew Colin Kissa <andrew [at] topdog [dot] za [dot] net>
Last edited 25/01/2009
The Sony PlayStation 3 is a DLNA compatible device, DLNA is a framework where home electronics can share digital media and content seamlessly. This tutorial is a followup to the previous howto on Ubuntu. Given that I like most others use CentOS as their server distribution of choice, I find it fitting to run my DLNA server on it as well. Although several other open source media servers exist, I chose to use Fuppes due to its ease of use as well as built in support for transcoding.
By following this howto you will be able to create a server that will allow you to play digital media stored on the server via a DLNA capable device such as the Sony PS3, Nokia N95, etc.
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The US National Security Agency has helped put together a list of the world’s most dangerous coding mistakes.
The 25 entry list contains errors that can lead to security holes or vulnerable areas that can be targeted by cyber criminals.
Experts say many of these errors are not well understood by programmers.
According to the SANS Institute in Maryland, just two of the errors led to more than 1.5m web site security breaches during 2008.
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