Introduction

Recently I had a few problems with my U.K based VPS host. My VPS went down and it took me some time to get it rebooted. When it did come back on line the VPS had lost the ability to do domain name look ups. This caused me issues as this machine relied upon this to send e-mails. It took me three days to ge the VPS back on line which was basically a total nightmare.

Basic FTP Shell Script for uploading files

Introduction

There are occasions where you might want to FTP data off site from a server or other host onto an FTP server

NOTE! Think a little before using FTP. It doesn't send login credentials (username / password) it an encrypted form and the data it transfers is not encrypted either. There are some security implications to using FTP as transfer protocol over public links.


#!/bin/bash

Introduction

Using a QNAP linux NAS you can backup MYSQL databases on remote servers. This article shows you how to write a script to do this. This script can then be run at set intervals using the cron scheduler to ensure your mysql data server is backed up safely.

This guide assumes your server is running the SSHD and allows you to run remote commands. For example a VPS server is the perfect example of this.

Step 1

Introduction

If you run an important server such as web server you should of course take regular off site backups. Now everyone knows that backups are a total pain to do manually and more often than not get forgotten. However, using linux cron you can automate this task easily and be more confident of your ability to recover should anything go wrong with your server and you need to restore. If you have a decent connection speed at your home or office you can program a QNAP 109 NAS (network attached storage) to take care of this important task for you.

If you need to backup your network device's (you know Cisco, HP etc) running configuration, one of the most common ways to do this is via a TFTP server. There are various tftp solutions out there and this guide covers setting up a centos box on how to become a tftp server. There a few guides out there already but this one covers Centos 5 Linux specifically.

Step 1.
You need to install the tftp-server service and the xinetd service software using yum.
The xinetd service is required as this controls the tftp server daemon.

Using the plug-in modular nature of PAM we can get a linux server to use RADIUS to authenticate users connecting via SSH. This guide tells you how to setup a Centos 5.2 server as your Radius "client" and Juniper Steel-Belted as your radius server authentication "server". We are going to use the pam_radius_module from free radius to provide the mechanism of authenticating ssh logins against a radius box.

For this example my environment consists of

A centos 5.2 radius client called "cyclone"
A Steel-Belted Radius server is called "turbo"
A username of dave

What it is: A basic guide to sharing and mounting remote NFS shares