David and Katherine Goodwin

Last night John Pinner gave a talk at SBLug covering Search Engine Optimisation.

Here is an exceedingly random collection of points, as a collective, we came up with.

CentOS 5.2 ships with a bug that stops it booting as a guest KVM image, but only for X86_64 on AMD chips - you'll see a kernel panic, and wonder WTF is wrong.

Solution - use an older version from the vault (e.g. 5.1) or presumably wait for a newer version to come along

(This problem won't affect VMWare guest images)

Right, here's how you could setup/install KVM on a Linux server where you don't want to (for whatever reason) use bridging - as I understand it, Bytemark don't like the idea of one machine using more than one MAC address for security purposes.

The script below creates a tun/tap device (tap0) configures it as a private (internal network) and creates iptables rules to forward traffic for the additional IP address to the server on the other end of the "private network".

Having heard much about SELinux over the last few years, I thought I'd finally make an effort to use it on two servers I've been setting up for a customer. My main desire to use it is because the customer has a fairly large code base, which is programmed in a number of different styles over a number of years by different developers. I'm sure there are vulnerabilities in the code.

On one server, once I got over general teething problems (e.g. if I mount a disk to /var/spool, I'll need to get it relabelled) it seemed to work fine - so I've left it to do it's thing.

It seems Linux User and Developer will have another issue out soon; which, if things go to plan will have a column written by me on whether being free (as in beer) is a good thing or not for open source adoption. I suspect after the magazine has been published, I'll publish the article on here too.

Today was day 1 of LugRadio Live 2008 (UK edition).

Headline news - There will be more LugRadio Live conferences, and the implication of more LugRadio episodes.

As per normal, we met all the usual suspects, and had a good time. I only attended two talks - one on Women in Open Source, and the other was about bzr. Perhaps the schedule wasn't worded too well, but it was hard to get excited by any of the descriptions given - I needed more info goddamit!.

Introduction

Reinstalling many machines with essentially the same content, is a time consuming process... here's how you can clone Linux machines...

This page details how to take an image of/clone a Linux system to use for restorating or wide scale rapid deployment, simplar to how utilities like Ghost work.

This document outlines how to use 'dd' or 'tar' to take a sytem image.

The 2008 UKUUG Spring conference is coming up soon (well, 31st March to 2nd April). It's focus is large scale systems admin, but some of the talks look appealing to a wider audience (e.g. anti-spam). The good news is that it's in Birmingham, which seems to be attracting a few more technical events lately :)

t-mobile's WebNWalk on Linux

Today, after having to organise a meeting with a customer in a room with no internet connectivity, we decided to 'buy' a t-mobile WebNWalk USB dongle thingy to connect to the web.

So... getting it to work... it was slightly painful. I'm not sure whether I needed to install the Vodafone thing or not - however, after installing it and restarting udev, it seemed to eventually start to work.

What?

This is a quick guide to installing Postfixadmin on a Debian Linux (Etch/4.0) server. I've done a similar guide on this before, but it's getting dated; hence this new one.

This guide also covers installing ClamAV to scan incoming mail and viruses.