data center

Top 10 Open Source Web-Based Project Management Software

last updated in Categories data center, Download of the day, GNU/Open source, Links, Linux, Networking, Software, Sys admin, Troubleshooting, UNIX

Project management software is not just for managing software based project. It can be used for variety of other tasks too. The web-based software must provide tools for planning, organizing and managing resources to achieve project goals and objectives. A web-based project management software can be accessed through an intranet or WAN / LAN using a web browser. You don’t have to install any other software on the system. The software can be easy of use with access control features (multi-user). I use project management software for all of our projects (for e.g. building a new cluster farm) for issue / bug-tracking, calender, gantt charts, email notification and much more.

Obviously I’m not the only user, the following open source software is used by some of the biggest research organizations and companies world wild. For e.g. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses track software or open source project such as lighttpd / phpbb use redmine software to keep track of their projects.

Poll: Common Causes Of Downtime In Your Data Center

last updated in Categories Business, data center, Hardware, High performance computing, Linux, Poll, Storage, UNIX

Unplanned downtime may be the result of a software bug, human error, equipment failure, power failure, and much more. Last week was a bad one. We faced three different downtime:

  • First, there was a fiber cut for one of our data center resulting into routing anomalies due BGP reroute. Traffic was rerouted but updating those BGP tables took some time to update.
  • Someone from networking team failed to follow proper maintenance procedures for network device resulted into 55 minutes downtime.
  • One of our SAN hardware failure – Many internal UNIX / Linux web applications use SAN to store data including file server, tracking apps, R&D apps, IT help desk, LAN and WAN servers failed. This one lasted for 12 hrs. It was stared around midnight. The vendor replaced entire SAN hardware. Now we have dual stacked SAN as a backup device for internal usage.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Security Through Obscurity: MAC Address Filtering ( Layer 2 Filtering )

last updated in Categories data center, fedora linux, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, GNU/Open source, Hardware, Iptables, Linux, Networking, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Security, Ubuntu Linux, UNIX, Windows, windows vista, Wireless networking

MAC Filtering (layer 2 address filtering) refers to a security access control methodology whereby the 48-bit address assigned to each network card is used to determine access to the network. Iptables, pf, and IPFW can block a certain MAC address on a network, just like an IP. One can deny or allow from MAC address like 00:1e:2a:47:42:8d using open source firewalls. MAC address filtering is often used to secure LAN or wireless network / devices. Is this technique effective?

How To Tail (View) Multiple Files on UNIX / Linux Console

last updated in Categories data center, Debian Linux, Download of the day, fedora linux, File system, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, GNU/Open source, Howto, Linux, Linux Log Management, Monitoring, package management, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Suse Linux, Sys admin, Tip of the day, UNIX

The tail command is one of the best tool to view log files in a real time using tail -f /path/to/log.file syntax on a Unix-like systems. The program MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). This is one of those dream come true program for UNIX sys admin job. You can browse through several log files at once and do various operations like search for errors and more.

BIND Named: Set a Zone Transfer IP Address For Master DNS Server

last updated in Categories BIND Dns, CentOS, data center, fedora linux, FreeBSD, High performance computing, Linux Scalability, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Troubleshooting

I’ve three nameserver load-balanced (LB) in three geo locations. Each LB has a front end public IP address and two backend IP address (one for BIND and another for zone transfer) are assigned to actual bind 9 server running Linux. So when a zone transfer initiates from slave server, all I get errors. A connection cannot be established, it tries again with the servers main ip or LB2 / LB3 ip. This is a problem because my servers are geo located and load balanced. However, there is a small workaround for this problem.

Linux: Boot a 2TB+ partition or Larger Array Using Grub

last updated in Categories CentOS, data center, fedora linux, File system, Gentoo Linux, Hardware, High performance computing, Howto, kernel, Linux, Linux Scalability, Linux Virtualization, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Storage, Tips, vmware, xen

I’ve already written about creating a partition size larger than 2TB under Linux using GNU parted command with GPT. In this tutorial, I will provide instructions for booting to a flat 2TB or larger RAID array under Linux using the GRUB boot loader.

Linux: Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?

last updated in Categories data center, Debian Linux, fedora linux, File system, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, kernel, Linux, Linux desktop, Linux laptop, OpenBSD, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Solaris, Storage, Suse Linux, Tuning, Ubuntu Linux, UNIX

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term “swap” to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?

Parallel NFS: Read / Write Hundreds of Gigabytes Per Second

last updated in Categories data center, File system, Hardware, High performance computing, kernel, Linux, News, Storage, UNIX

NFS is pretty old file sharing technology for UNIX based system and storage systems. However, it suffers from performance issues. NFSv4.1 address data access issues by adding a new feature called parallel NFS (pNFS) – a method of introducing Data Access Parallelism. The end result is ultra fast file sharing for clusters and high availability configurations.

The Network File System (NFS) is a stalwart component of most modern local area networks (LANs). But NFS is inadequate for the demanding input- and output-intensive applications commonly found in high-performance computing — or, at least it was. The newest revision of the NFS standard includes Parallel NFS (pNFS), a parallelized implementation of file sharing that multiplies transfer rates by orders of magnitude.

Linux tgtadm: Setup iSCSI Target ( SAN )

last updated in Categories CentOS, data center, Debian Linux, fedora linux, File system, GNU/Open source, Hardware, Linux, Storage

Linux target framework (tgt) aims to simplify various SCSI target driver (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SRP, etc) creation and maintenance. The key goals are the clean integration into the scsi-mid layer and implementing a great portion of tgt in user space.

The developer of IET is also helping to develop Linux SCSI target framework (stgt) which looks like it might lead to an iSCSI target implementation with an upstream kernel component. iSCSI Target can be useful:

a] To setup stateless server / client (used in diskless setups).
b] Share disks and tape drives with remote client over LAN, Wan or the Internet.
c] Setup SAN – Storage array.
d] To setup loadbalanced webcluser using cluster aware Linux file system etc.

In this tutorial you will learn how to have a fully functional Linux iSCSI SAN using tgt framework.

Seagate Barracuda: 1.5TB Hard Drive Launched

last updated in Categories Business, data center, Data recovery, File system, Hardware, Linux, Linux desktop, Storage, Sys admin, UNIX

Wow, this is a large size desktop hard disk for storing movies, tv shows, music / mp3s, and photos. You can also load multiple operating systems using vmware or other software for testing purpose. This hard disk comes with 5 year warranty and can transfer at 300MB/s. But, How reliable is the 1.5TB hard disk?