I have been always a very big fan on Fedora Linux distribution. In recent times I have moved very much into Ubuntu. Three days back Fedora team had released the new version 9 named sulphur. I really wanted to test it how well it is working with VMware. So the hunt began.
Downloaded the i686 DVD version and started the installation. In VMware OS list there was no fedora so I had to select red hat Linux as option. The installation went very smooth and no issues or error. I felt the installater was little heavy when compared to Ubuntu installation.
Fedora booted up well and detected most of the hardware of VMware. But It was not as smooth as Ubuntu was on VMware.
I heard there is lot of improvement and enhancements. But Ubuntu is very far ahead when it comes to Desktop Linux. I prefer sticking with Ubuntu than Fedora sulphur 
Tonight I installed BSD system on my iPhone. Once that is complete I installed openSSH, Term-vt100. I opened terminal and changed my root password using the command passwd.
I found the ip of the iPhone using the command ifconfig. Latter I was able to connect to the iPhone using ssh from my laptop ;-). I was even able to ftp files to my iphone over SSH.
I Installed apache, php edited httpd.conf and I was able to run php scripts from my iPhone. It has all the basic modules that is needed to write a simple powerful application with sqlite. Taken a screenshot too 
Wow this gadget is really amazing
We got a brand new IBM Lenovo laptop without any operating system installed. These days most of the new laptops comes with Windows Vista installed and which sucks majorly. Then we decided we will install Linux on the laptop for a difference. Then I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on it and it worked perfect. The live cd was able to detect all the hardware on a single go.
I am such a fan of fedora and wanted to test fedora so checked out the website it had new release fedora 8 werewolf. It had live cd so downloaded it and tested on the laptop. To my surprise even fedora live cd detected everything. So reinstalled the laptop operating system with fedora 8.
I installed all the need software using yum as usual . Then I installed the Quake 3 and wanted burn test my laptop for performance. I opened couple of movies, music player and quake running auto demo on 800×600. The processor usage was around 90 to 95%. Everything worked amazing fast and in another workspace I was able to do normal installation and browsing. I ran the test for more than 3 hours and the laptop temperature was so normal. No overheating and no issues. I was totally amazed by the laptop performance over Linux.
I am really happy to see such a stable fedora core which is now capable of detected all hardware. Lenovo laptop performance was amazingly superb
The task for the day was to make a router based on Linux. All I wanted to do is to replace the stupid home based router and do a fully Linux based one. Round one we need to buy hardware for the router. I know Linux can run on very low configuration hardware but those are very hard to find in the market. So I decided to go with shuttle computers. Basically shuttle computers are small and compact when compared to normal desktops. The model number used to make this one was SD32G2. You can read the complete specification of the hardware form this website. There is an on board gigabyte Ethernet controller.
Other than that I used the following
- Pentium 4 3.2 HT processor
- 80 GB Sata hard disk
- 1 GB RAM
- Realtek gigabyte Ethernet card
- DVD drive (mainly used for installing purpose).
Now the system is ready to rock and roll. The next big step was to install some flavor of linux and test the firewall. I was thinking of fedora latter my friend Lijeesh showed me some new variant of linux which are there only for this purpose routing and firewall solution. Some distribution which are done for routing purpose are
I installed and tested in the same above mentioned order. And I found some issues with each installation. Let me explain the hurdles I faced in each.
IPCOP - The installation was smooth. I had some issues in setting up my on board Ethernet card. Basically it was marvell chipset. I tried installing sk98lin drivers for it and it wont work. Then the firewall not supporting NAT.
Smoothwall - The installation was smooth. It even detected the on board Ethernet and it worked. It had really a good web interface with funky ajax effects. Like live bandwidth monitor, live messenger chat viewer etc. But when it comes to routing features the was very much limited 
. One such problem was it didn’t NAT routing.
Clarkconnet - It is a commercial solution. It is based on red hat distribution. I had some issues with my onboard ethernet card. It was detecting it but the drivers was not working. I had to issue command “modprobe sk98lin” and everything worked well. It had all the routing features please features. I tested it well and it was stable. Currently I am using this for my routing solution.
It took me 4 days to figure out the best options for routing solution based on Linux. I am not sure that the above conclusion are 100% correct. May be I have screwed it up somewhere. But it was fun experimenting
I wanted to track some outgoing mails in my servers. Initially I was using IMAP to solve this issue. Then It was becoming slow everyday. They started complaining that the mail was really slow. I was forced to move to POP3 which is much faster compared to IMAP. Once I activated POP3 tracking was out of my hands. I search a lot on how to play with filters in exim mail.
It is quite powerful and give total control on incoming and outgoing mails. To solve my problem I need to play only with outgoing mails. There is a file named /etc/antivirus.exim is the file we need to play with. I edited the file and added the below lines to make it work for me.
if first_delivery
and ( ("$h_from:" contains "test1@imthi.com")
or ("$h_from:" contains "test2@imthi.com")
or ("$h_from:" contains "test3@imthi.com")
)
then
unseen deliver "tracker@imthi.com"
endif
The above block checks if the outgoing mail is on first delivery and who is the sender. Based on the sender I am sending a bcc copy to another mailbox. You can play more by studying the exim filter commands more
My mission was install subversion on our server withour breaking cpanel. After so much googling I was able to do it. It took me like a week to figure out a method which will work without any issues on cpanel. The main issue was cpanel still doesn’t support apache 2 series. They do have support on edge version but it is highly unstable and doesn’t compile all the needed modules for php. In apache 1.3 the support for mod_dav is not very good. The only alternative for subversion was to use apache 2 series. So I started digging for articles.
I found there is a method to install both apache 1.3 and apache 2 together. Only thing is we have to use another port than 80 for apache 2. Let me go step by step like how I installed subversion.
1. Install subversion : This was really easy on centos. I just have to use yum and it does it all.
yum install subversion
This will install all libraries needed for subversion to work. Sometimes you may come across an issue with perl-uri. Just Google for “perl uri rpm” and you can download an install the same. In my case I had to download and install.
rpm -ivh perl-URI-1.35-2.2.noarch.rpm
2. The next thing was to create a repository.
cd /var/
mkdir -p repo/source/
svnadmin create /var/repo/source
With above commands I created a subversion repo named source. You can check inside the directory if lot of files are created. If created subversion works fine ;-).
3. Now we can proceed with apache 2 installation. I choosed apache 2.0.59
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --with-port=2080 --enable-dav --enable-dav-fs --enable-proxy --enable-rewrite --enable-so
make
make install
/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
Apache2 installed at port 2080 with dav , proxy and rewrite and started so simple ;-).
4. Now we have to compile mod_svn for apache 2. For this I had to download the source of subversion. Please check the version of subversion installed. You can check with the help of yum.
yum info subversion
Next download the same of subversion source and you need to compile mod_svn.
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
make
make install
Now mod_svn is installed and activated on apache2. We can configure apache 2 to serve svn files with the help of mod_dav.
5. Configure apache 2 for svn. To do this I had to change the settings httpd.conf of apache 2. This file will be located here /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
<location>
DAV svn
SVNPath /var/repo/source
</location>
Restart apache2 once you made the above changes. Now you should be able to see the svn files from this url http://localhost:2080/svn/. You should be able to see the subversion files at revision 0. There is will be nothing in it as we have not added any files.
6. Now we have add proxy to apache 1.3 so that we can internally proxy the files between apache 2 and apache 1. You can download the source of currently installed apache 1.3 or you can find the same in /home/installd/buildapache/apache_1.3.xx/src/modules/proxy
Just goto that directory and run this command
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -c *.c
That will install mod_proxy to apache 1.3
7. You have add this setting to apache 1.3 conf file to proxy the http://localhost:2080/svn/ in standard port 80 of some website.
Add these line to any virtual host present in the conf file.
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass / http://locahost:2080/svn
I had added for the virtual host svn.imthi.com.
You can view my subversion at http://svn.imthi.com/ username : guest and password : guest.
All done. If you wish add authentication you can Google on how to add simple http authentication. You can even add policies if you want. The final setting should look something like this with authentication and polices
<location>
DAV svn
SVNPath /var/repo/source
AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/repo/conf/svnpolicy
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Imthiaz Subversion repository"
AuthUserFile /var/repo/conf/svnusers
Require valid-user
</location>
For this svn book will be of great use. Have fun …!!!
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