Thomaschaaf's questions

My start up is building a computer which runs debian linux and some custom programs. What is the best way to remotely access the machines without the user having to do anything?

Our product is currently in an early stage where the update process is not well tested and could break itself. I am looking for an easy way to access the machines remotely via SSH. The machines are behind standard home firewalls and don't have a static IP or anything of this nature.

My thought was using something along the lines of a init script which runs a reverse SSH such as: ssh -N -R 2222:localhost:22 [email protected]

The thing I don't like about this is that each machine has to have its own port and user. Also even if I don't need the SSH connection it is open and traffic used.

I am thinking of writing an application on the server which provides a simple webpage the clients check every x minutes using an http request whether it needs to connect via SSH. If it does the server script creates an account and tells the client what port and user to use.

Hey is there a way to setup one server for cacti and having all the other servers send their data to it? I would have thought, that the poller sends all the info to the central server including the rdd files etc.. is there a way to do this?

Is there maybe a simple simular tool to do this if cacti does not have that capability? I would like to check CPU load, Disk space, RAM usage, Process number, logged in users... nice to have would be ping, disk i/o

I would love a simple setup and client I can run on all my debian machines...

I am searching for a way to secure my server from bad guys and the worst case scenario would be that they'd gain access to one of the users how do I receive an email on activity? I would like to get an email when someone logs in (any user, since no one should be logged in to them, except when someone is actually allowed to work on them) We have hourly backups of our servers

are there better ways to get notified that suspicous activity is going on?

I am currently trying to get people to go to http://a.abc.com (I send them to the https site after getting some X-HTTP-Headers and saving that in a session) I always want them to go to the a.abc.com site and if the http_host isn't a.abc.com I want them to redirect them there :)

I hope you guys can help?

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName a.abc.com
        ServerAlias b.abc.com bcd.com efg.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/wclp/public
        SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV production

        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !a.abc.com$
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://a.abc.com/$1 [R=301, L]

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName a.abc.com
        ServerAlias b.abc.com bcd.com efg.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/wclp/public
        SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV production

        SSLEngine on
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/crt.pem
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/key.pem

        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !a.abc.com$
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://a.abc.com/$1 [R=301, L]

</VirtualHost>

a friend of mine works with diabled children and is thus often confronted with children, that are extremly slow typists. At their school every child has an account on an MS Exchange type Server so the windows clients authenticate themselves at the server and every child has their own account with their own password (it is linked to a website on which they can send and receive emails etc.) now he would like to have a way that the children instead of typing in "username" and "secretpassword" that they can just insert their usb drives (which would cost around 10 cents each) and then are automatically logged into the computer with their accounts. Is there a way to do this? Please remember, that the computers are in a Windows Domain and the users are not on the computers themselves.

I hope you can help me and my friend! Thanks

Our current setup is exim4 with the vexim addon. Since we have to move our mailserver to another server and into a VM we wanted to do it right and switch to another mailserver if that is suggested.

Somethings we are looking for:

• (POP3/)IMAP and SMTP
• Multidomain, Multiuser and all configurable in a MySQL DB, so that we can even create mailboxes from a web app
• encrypted passwords only
• Good resources so that setup is easy, the more to read the better ;)
• Run on debian lenny
• We want it on our own servers so no we don't want to use Google
• Optimally I would want Exchange capability, so that we can sync our contacts, calendar etc to our palm pres and iphones and sync with Thunderbird and Outlook

I am looking at my server's spamassasin and have stumbled across the "problem" that my outgoing email sends out its own X-Report and X-Score in the header (programs used are Outlook 2007 as client and exim4 with the vexim plugin and Spamassasin). On the one hand I want to get rid of the sent X-Report which gets sent out with every email and on the other hand I still want to have it for incoming mails. While I was trying to fix this (which I still haven't) I stumbled across this "error" which makes my email less trustworthy:

1.4 MSGID_MULTIPLE_AT      Message-ID contains multiple '@' characters

How do I get rid of the multiple '@' characters?

I am trying to build a backup server which will make ... backups... :) Since I have never built a server like this what would you say should I look for?

Components I have been looking at:

• Intel E2220
• Enermax Modu82+ 425 Watt
• 2x Corsair 1 GB DDR2 Ram at 533

I still need a Motherboard and some good drives.. I would like to get 3 TB of space.

Hope you guys can help. I have looked at the Asus P5Q VM because it has 6 SATA ports and a built in grafics card and 6 500 GB Drives by Western Digital 5002ABYS RE3

What are things I should look for? I am not planing on putting the backup server in raid though.

I don't get why there are two different programs in a minimal install to install software. Don't they do the same thing? Is there a big difference? I have read everywhere to use aptitude over apt-get but I still don't know the difference

For my home I want to be a nice neighbor actually I have let my wifi open for the past maybe 6 or 7 years. I know that WEP, etc can be cracked within a couple of minutes but my neighbors son who works in IT told his mom and she told me that I am doing bad things and you know the story..

Do you think it's okay to leave your wifi open to the public? I live in a suburb with a tiny street and about 8 houses in reach of my wifi. I have a 16k DSL line so if some one joins me for a couple hours I would probably not notice.

I would love your thoughts on whether I should encrypt my wifi or not.

I have around 25 virtual machines running on Xen. I don't really feel like going through 25 VMs and running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. I would much rather have it do that for me and in some way contact me if there are any packages to install. Is there a way to do just that? I am running Debian on the host and all the virtual machines.

Sorry it's a dupe: Best practices for keeping UNIX packages up to date?

I have a quad core machine which is running debian with a xen kernel. I am running a couple linux servers on there which don't do a lot of CPU intesive stuff, but I have there a windows server 2008 vm, which seems to be sucking the life out of one single vcpu. Is there a way to give it more vcpus? vcpus = 2 for example does nothing, which does the charm on the linux vms. Even xm list still shows the vm with one vcpu.

I administr a school "for pleasure" and we are always discussing when we should update software. For example today Office 2007 SP2 came out and I was woundering how long I should wait before updating all the pcs. Since there are a few ~130 pcs and we have an automated install client having to fix bugs in the end is a lot harder so how long would you think should I wait before updating?

I am running Win7 beta on a pc and would just like to update it to the RC. I have read that Mircosoft don't want you to upgrade and for that reason have turned upgrading off. Is there a way to upgrade that machine without having to reinstall a lot of software?

I just set up a box with a couple XEN virtual machines. One of the virtual machines is running Windows Server 2008 and will soon run our openvpn as well. Is there a way to share this (network) printer to all of our computer so we can print stuff from home and when we get to the office its ready to be dealt with?