[HowtoForge] Newsletter 07/16/2009

HowtoForge Newsletter 07/16/2009
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New HOWTOs:
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* Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Debian Lenny
* Striping Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Debian Lenny
* Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)
* Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 9.04
* Installing Moovida Media Center On Ubuntu 9.04
* Anonymous SSH Sessions With TOR
* How To Defend slowloris DDoS With mod_qos (Apache2 On Debian [Lenny])
* Using ICMP And ICMP6 Service Objects In Firewall Builder

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Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Debian Lenny
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This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and heartbeat on Debian Lenny. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using heartbeat, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. HAProxy is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up-a-high-availability-load-balancer-with-haproxy-heartbeat-on-debian-lenny

Striping Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Debian Lenny
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This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices in a round-robin fashion and thus written concurrently) across four single storage servers (running Debian Lenny) with GlusterFS. The client system (Debian Lenny as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/striping-across-four-storage-nodes-with-glusterfs-on-debian-lenny

Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)
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This guide shows how to install and configure Smokeping on Ubuntu 9.04 to monitor network latency. From the Smokeping web site: "SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection."

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/monitoring-network-latency-with-smokeping-ubuntu-9.04

Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 9.04
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Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on an Ubuntu 9.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-nginx-with-php5-and-mysql-support-on-ubuntu-9.04

Installing Moovida Media Center On Ubuntu 9.04
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This tutorial explains how you can install the Moovida media center on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. Moovida is a media center "bringing the best of the internet to your TV screen. Automatically creating your own digital library you can browse from your sofa with a remote control. The elegant and easy to use interface automatically displays artwork and fan art throughtout and gives you access to movie synopsis and artist info."

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-moovida-media-center-on-ubuntu-9.04

Anonymous SSH Sessions With TOR
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OpenSSH is a great means to protect your connection from being sniffed by others. However, this isn't always enough. Simply proving that you connected to a server is enough to get incriminated. Unfortunately, SSH doesn't provide a native way to obfuscate to whom it connects. Instead, a proxy server can be set up. And this is where TOR comes to play. This howto covers installing TOR on a Debian based system and setting up SSH to use TOR.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/anonymous-ssh-sessions-with-tor

How To Defend slowloris DDoS With mod_qos (Apache2 On Debian [Lenny])
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mod_qos gives some fine-grained opportunities to scale the number of used connections and to defend an attack according to bandwidth limits. Unfortunately it is only available as source-package and there are many possible settings, wich might be hard to setup for this special case. So I provide the way that helped me.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-defend-slowloris-ddos-with-mod_qos-apache2-on-debian-lenny

Using ICMP And ICMP6 Service Objects In Firewall Builder
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This article continues the series of articles on Fireall Builder, a graphical firewall configuration and management tool that supports many Open Source firewall platforms as well as Cisco IOS access lists and Cisco ASA (PIX). This article demonstrates how you can work with ICMP and ICMP6 service objects in Firewall Builder.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/using-icmp-and-icmp6-service-objects-in-firewall-builder

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