Author Archive

Useful shell commands: last

Today I will start a new series for linux/*nix newbies called Useful shell commands. Every now and then I will write about one of the powerful commands you’ll find on your shell. I will start the series with a command called last.
# last
Calling last on your commandline gives you a list of logins. You will [...]


High available NFS4 server with drbd 0.8, pacemaker 1.0, heartbeat, openais on OpenSUSE 11.1

For my podcast project I got five new root servers which are all connected internally through a switch. Two of the servers are connected directly over a crossover cable. Those two servers have 3 NICs, the other 2 servers have 2 NICs.
I share the website’s HTML, images and other resources through the NFS server to [...]


php-fpm runlevel start script for OpenSuSE 11.1

Nowadays OpenSUSE comes with almost all packages I need to run a fast and reliable webserver. As I have written before I use nginx and php-fpm for our podcast service.
You can get up-to-date packages of nginx through OpenSuSE’s build service. I have not yet found a RPM package of php-fpm though. Therefore I compile it [...]


How to find out user id on linux system

For a mount command I needed to find out what user id my user account had. There are several ways to find out. As root you could look into the passwd file (most likely /etc/passwd) or on OpenSuSE use the Yast user module. But I was looking for a way to find out my user [...]


System upgrade openSUSE 11.0 to openSUSE 11.1 with zypper

I had to set up a server. The hoster offers openSUSE 11.0 at the moment but no openSUSE 11.1 yet. As I like to go with the latest and greatest I decided to upgrade the system to openSUSE 11.1 after using the hoster’s installation image for openSUSE 11.0. I searched on the web how a [...]


New software packages bundled with OpenSuSE 11.1

The newest version of OpenSuSE got released today. OpenSuSE 11.1 brings more than 230 new features the press release says. As I keep my systems up to date thanks to smart and all the repositories only a number of these new feature are missing on my OpenSuSE 11.0 installations. The most important reason I quickly [...]


The open source application stack for Windows

The bad thing with most new computers is that they come with Windows ™ preinstalled. The good thing is those Windows ™ installations don’t bring much (useful) software along. Users have to actively use which software they want to use.


ejabberd on GNU/Linux OpenSuSE 11.0

I heard about the successful usage of ejabberd from weblin’s CTO Heiner yesterday at lunch during BarCamp Hamburg 08.
I was thinking of deploying jabber services for podcast.de for a while now but couldn’t decide which server to take. I checked the ejabberd website. The software looks promising. So I give it a try.

smart install [...]


Free e-book shellprogramming

I had to write a shell program. And I was looking for a how-to / manual covering my favorites shell command set. I found a nice e-book on Wikibooks: Linux-Kompendium: Shellprogrammierung which helped me a lot. Hence the link for other people.


Apache and lighttpd replaced by nginx for PHP application

A while back I wrote an article Switching from Apache HTTP Server to Lighttpd – Installing Lighttpd. Back then I migrated static stuff to lighttpd but left the dynamic stuff (PHP) with Apache.
I was never really satisfied with the speed of our system under load. I tried and tried. I optimized a lot of stuff [...]