Here is a link to my post about how to upgrade to trac 0.11 I’ve written at the “Linux System Admins Blog“. Check it out if you have to upgrade to trac 0.11 it might be useful

The DRAC (Dell Remote Access Controller) is an interface card by Dell which provides out-of-band management. The controller has its own processor, memory, battery, network connection, and access to the system bus. Key features include power management, virtual media access and remote console, all available through a supported web browser. This gives system administrators the ability to configure a machine as if they were sitting at the local console (terminal).

The DRAC card has several services bound on its dedicated IP; here is the list of the default ports and their usage:

• 22 Secure Shell
• 23 Telnet
• 80 HTTP
• 443 HTTPS
• 161 SNMP (UDP)
• 3668 Virtual Media server
• 5869 Remote racadm server
• 5900-5901 Console Redirection

This list can be useful, if you need to setup port forwarding, or firewall rules while working with DRAC cards. For more, check dell’s manuals.

If you are trying to compile php with the option –with-interbase and receive this error:
configure: error: libgds, libib_util or libfbclient not found
it means that you don’t have firebird development libraries installed.

If you are running on debian you can easily install firebird development libraries using:
aptitude install firebird2-dev
and you should be able to move forward with the compile.

WordPress 2.7 beta3 was just released and probably we will see the final release very soon. In the meantime, here is a great article outlining the changes this version will bring (a complete rewrite of the admin interface): 10 Things You Need to Know about WordPress 2.7, by Aaron Brazell.

ps. if you are using svn for your installation and want to test this release, you need to update to the trunk version:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

Today Amazon announced the public beta of Amazon CloudFront, their AWS service for content delivery. This is the service that many users of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) have been waiting for a long time. Even if S3 was never a ‘real’ CDN (content delivery network) it was used by many sites to serve static content. The main limitation of this approach was that it had no geographical awareness as content delivery networks usually have; the fact that S3 is highly scalable and well priced made this solution acceptable on S3.

CloudFront is the answer to all users’ requests about using S3 as a CDN, delivering the content using a global network of 14 edge locations. CloudFront uses S3 to store the original file, and caches copies of the content close to end users locations, lowering latency when they download the objects.

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The % character is a special char for crontab entries, and in order to use it we have to escape it. For example a crontab entry like this:
1 0 * * * /bin/sleep `/usr/bin/expr $RANDOM % 600` ; /usr/local/bin/mycommand
that attempts to run mycommand hourly with a random delay for the start, will fail because cron will see the % character and ignore the rest of the command; it will just run: /bin/sleep `/usr/bin/expr $RANDOM that will return a random number between 0-32767 and exit.

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The Debian project announced yesterday that it has renamed the former “Custom Debian Distribution” concept (under which Debian projects such as Debian Edu, Debian Jr, Debian Med, Debian GIS and Debian Science were collectively known) to the catchier name “Debian Pure Blends.”

The Custom Debian Distribution/Debian Pure Blends concept is similar to what Fedora calls “Spins“. Essentially the releases under the Debian Pure Blend heading are Debian at their core (compatible with Debian base packages for updating) but configured to support a particular target group out-of-the-box, like:

• Debian Edu: a Blend aimed at schools
• Debian Junior: For children
• Debian Med: Medical
• Debian Science: Debian for different sciences

For a detailed explanations about Debian Pure Blends, check out the Debian wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends

This post will show how to setup an auto-reply message using vacation on a debian etch server running postfix. This should work in the same way using other email servers, but this was tested with postfix. I’ll assume that you have postfix already running properly on the server. The first step is to install the vacation package. Since vacation is available in etch we can install it just by running:
aptitude install vacation
and this will install vacation version 3.3.0 on the system

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We are working on a project to implement ISP failover and loadbalancing for a corporate office. So far, we have looked over some hardware solutions but also software linux based ones. VPN is not a must, but it would be nice to have it also on the same device. Here are the best choices we looked so far:

A. Hardware solutions:

1. PePLink Balance 20L/200/300
2. Netgear FVX538
3. Linksys RV042/RV082
4. Xincom Twin WAN Router XC-DPG502
5. ZyXEL ZyWALL 35 UTM

B. Software solutions:

1. Vyatta: http://www.vyatta.org/
2. Endian: http://www.endian.com/en/community/

If you have a better experience on this we would love to hear your suggestions or previous experiences with such devices and your opinion on what is the best way to implement ISP failover and loadbalancing.