Linux configuration, Automation, Security – Sysadmin/DevOps blog

Topic of today’s post stays a bit aside from day-to-day coding and development but nonetheless covers a very important subject: our application log files. Our apps do generate enormous amount of logs which if done right are extremely handy for problems troubleshooting.

It’s not a big deal if you have a single application up and running, but nowadays apps, particularity webapps, run on hundreds of servers. With such a scale figuring out where is a problem becomes a challenge. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of a view which aggregates all logs from all our running applications into single dashboard so we could see a whole picture constructed from the pieces? Please welcome: Logstash, the logs aggregation framework.

Although it’s not the only solution available, I found Logstash to be very easy to use and extremely simple to integrate. To start with, we don’t even need to do anything on the application side, Logstash can do all the job for us.

Any system admin working in a service provider network would certainly agree that Cacti is one of the most widely used tools in network management solutions. It is open source, has built in user authentications and user permission features, shipped with frequently used graph templates like bandwidth, 95th percentile, hard disk usage, CPU usage, load average, RAM statistics and many more. Cacti also supports 3rd party templates and plugins. If those are not enough, one can write and use one’s own templates, and that is the beauty of open source software.

How do I setup and manage a virtualized environment with Kernel based Virtual Machine (KVM) in CentOS or Red Hat Enterpise Linux version 6 server on IBM server? Can you provide step-by-step commands of how to install and manage Virtual Machines (VMs) on a physical server using KVM for RHEL/CentOS version 6.4?

Tutorial details
Difficulty Advanced (rss)
Root privileges Yes
Requirements VT enabled server
Estimated completion time 1h
KVM is part of RHEL and CentOS Linux. You can easily install the same using the following commands. Please note that only the package names have changed in RHEL/CentOS 6.x. If you are using RHEL / CentOS 5.x, read our previous CentOS / Redhat (RHEL) v.5.x KVM Virtulization guide for more information.

As an owner of the website it is very difficult to manage multiple websites without a control panel. However to suit the needs, we need a custom hosting plan.
A Web hosting control panel is a totally web-based interface which has capability to manage your web services under a single location. These web based control panels can manage email accounts, FTP accounts, file management functions, creation of subdomains, disk space monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, create backups and many more.

Ajenti includes dozens of pre-made plugins that let you configure both your OS and server software. List of supported software includes Apache, Cron, CTDB, NFSD, Iptables, Munin, MySQL, Netatalk, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Samba, lm-sensors, Squid 3, Supervisor.
Fast and responsive interface, low memory footprint and handy tools like file manager, terminal and code editor - everything a happy sysadmin needs.

MySQL Proxy transparently passes information between a client and a MySQL server. The proxy can audit the information flow in both directions and change it if necessary, which could be useful for protecting the MySQL server from malicious queries or for altering the information clients receive without actually making changes to the database. The proxy can also do load balancing between MySQL servers, and perform flow optimization by directing SELECT statements to read-only slave servers, which enhances MySQL scalability by allowing you to add more servers for read operations.

The virsh command can be used to mange local or remote guest operating systems. The program can be used to create, pause, and shutdown domains. It can also be used to list current domains.

PHP Open Monitor is a Web-based network monitor written with PHP. It lets you specify the hosts and ports that you wish to monitor. It can notify you via email/ICQ each time some host/port goes.

Daniel Nichter przedstawił na łamach InfoWorldu listę 10 opensource'owych narzędzi dla administratorów baz danych MySQL, które powinny im znacznie ułatwić życie. Przytaczamy poniżej tę interesującą listę – wielu z tych programów wcześniej nie znaliśmy.