My Blog http://www.1to1consultant.co.uk tag:LDAP_Users_Administration_GUI In recent years I've got involved several times on different projects regarding authentication platforms such as Single Sign-On or a LDAP platform for authenticating users on Unix and Windows servers. A few months ago whilst working on a personal project for authentication of VPN users on a LDAP server I created a web GUI using ExtJS for users' administration. Most recently I worked on another LDAP related platform and I found quite handy the GUI I created before. (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2009/01/24/LDAP_Users_Administration_GUI.html Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:39:49 tag:Network_redundancy When setting up a new server or servers cluster you should always be looking at what you should be doing to prevent downtimes: hardware failures, network failures, etc. (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/09/16/Network_redundancy.html Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:01:00 tag:A_world_of_files I always had a lot of interest for the different filesystems available on UNIX systems since I worked as developer creating a Linux distribution. Back then reiserfs was the hottest thing around as the first widely available filesystem supporting journaling.With time I got involved on many different projects where I could use my filesystems knowledge to improve a service. I was quite surprise to find out many sys admins would not take filesystem capabilities in mind when building up a new platform. I also found a lot of old school sys admins that have been using the same for many years and would not change it!A few years ago I was on charge of the USENET platform on a known ISP. The amount of data that was coming in and out the platform was massive and the servers were expending 99% of the time either writing or reading.I did then a lot of investigation and I discovered that some colleagues running Usenet platform were using XFS as an alternative. After quite a lot of time spent there, I managed to apply a few patches both provided to me and made by me to increase even more the XFS perfomance. The result was a drop on usage down to 60%Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying you should use XFS. What I'm saying is you should choose carefully the fs you're going to use depending on the platform you are bulding. Some require to be fast opening and closing small files, others large files, etc. No fs is good on all of them so you should get some benchmarks and give it some thought.Lateley I'm finding more and more companies turning into Sun ZFS. And with good reason. It's one of the most powerful fs I've seen. It's very fast, very resiliant and it has some brilliant well made features such as snapshots, utilities to duplicate pools (cloning), etc.You would expect something as good as this to be very difficult to use or administrate but it couldn't be easier. It takes just a couple of commands to get it up and running. These is a bit of my cheatsheet:- Create disk mirror (RAID1 with disks c0d1 andamp; c1d1)zpool create pool mirror c0d1 c1d1- Create filesystem in the poolzfs create pool/test1- Change mountpointszfs set mountpoint=none poolzfs set mountpoint=/test1 pool/test1- Create snapshotzfs snapshot pool/test1@my_snap- Copy filesystem to another serverzfs send pool/test1@my_snap | ssh root@other_server zfs receive pool/newtest1- Destroy snapshotzfs destroy pool1/test1@my_snap (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/09/02/A_world_of_files.html Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:15:31 tag:The_problem_of_SPAM This is a subject that annoys many people and worries many business. In my experience I worked for companies investing large quantities of cash improving the mail systems and all due to SPAM. On some estimates made by large corporations and ISP's around 80% to 90% of all mail is actually SPAM. But what are the implications? They're many but in my opinion the three more important are: (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/04/25/The_problem_of_SPAM.html Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:25:26 tag:Python_SQLObject A few days ago I talked about using Python for web development together with CherryPy. I didn't mention at that time the other great thing about Python Web Development as oppose to PHP or Perl: SQLObject It's rare nowadays to do a web development without a back-end database. And when we talk about databases we have to talk about all the usual queries we are tired of doing: (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/04/11/Python_SQLObject.html Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:04:34 tag:The_OS_war There is and there always will be a war between Operating Systems. They compete between each other for a place in the top. Some driven by large companies, some others driven by users groups and communities with companies support (ie RedHat). The competition is hard and each OS will claim to be better than the other. But the winner (if any) will not get its place because it's the better among them but because it has the biggest amount of followers. (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/04/08/The_OS_war.html Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:07:06 tag:Python_web_development Whenever I'm asked what to use for a web development project my reply is usually PHP + MySQL. Why? (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/04/06/Python_web_development.html Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:55:45 tag:A_new_beginning It's very difficult to manage a business and I always thought that it's very helpful to have someone at hand to ask a question or make a quick request for something you need. This, unfortunately, it's not happening on todays business as much as I think it should be. andnbsp; (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2008/04/01/A_new_beginning.html Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:12:19 tag:Reviewing_lighttpd Looking at how to speed up some of the websites I have done using PHP, I decided to try lighttpd. It made be surprising for some people I hadn't done it already but the truth is all business I worked for used apache so I never really needed to do it. (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2007/12/14/Reviewing_lighttpd.html Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:58:14 tag:IE_problem_resolved Just a first look and I've seen it. How many times did I cause a similar problem? Too many. Basically I did a search and replace on my favourite editor, vim for the work opacity and I replaced too many. Some of the replaced lines affected IE and Safari but not Mozilla so I was not looking for this in the beginning. (continue) http://1to1consultant.co.uk/blog/2007/12/09/IE_problem_resolved.html Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:34:07