[HowtoForge] Newsletter 07/15/2010

HowtoForge Newsletter 07/15/2010
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New HOWTOs:
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* How To Make An Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop Resemble A Mac (With Elementary, Docky & Gloobus-Preview)
* Ghosting The Machine
* Installing PowerDNS (With MySQL Backend) And Poweradmin On Debian Lenny
* Install Imule On Debian Lenny
* How To Run Your Own Name Server With ISPConfig 3 And Fast Hosts
* Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool

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How To Make An Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop Resemble A Mac (With Elementary, Docky & Gloobus-Preview)
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This article shows how you can change the appearance of your Ubuntu 10.04 desktop so that it resembles a Mac. This can be achieved with the help of Elementary, Docky, and Gloobus-Preview. Elementary is a project that provides a popular icon set and GTK theme; Docky is an interactive dock (like the one you know from a Mac) that provides easy access to some of the files, folders, and applications on your computer, and more; and Gloobus-Preview is an extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file or directory.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-make-an-ubuntu-10.04-desktop-resemble-a-mac-with-elementary-docky-and-gloobus-preview

Ghosting The Machine
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This is a short but potentially extremely handy guide to ghosting one Linux box to another (or simply making a full backup of a desktop/server). You might have a small office where you customise one desktop just how you like it and need to roll this out to N other PC's or simply want a backup of a server or desktop to another machine or even to an image file. The main tool here is netcat which is extremely powerful and has a multitude of other great uses that won't be covered here.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/ghosting-the-machine

Installing PowerDNS (With MySQL Backend) And Poweradmin On Debian Lenny
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This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on a Debian Lenny system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver - in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-powerdns-with-mysql-backend-and-poweradmin-on-debian-lenny

Install Imule On Debian Lenny
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When I write these lines, the latest version of Imule is 1.4.6. But ... It relies on packages version (libgcj10, libstdc++6) that are released with the unstable (sid) version of Debian. So either you upgrade Debian to unstable version or you choose a lower version of Imule. I chose the latter: to install an old version of Imule. I tested few of them and 1.3.5 seems to work quite well with Debian Lenny (stable).

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/install-imule-on-debian-lenny

How To Run Your Own Name Server With ISPConfig 3 And Fast Hosts
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This tutorial shows how you can run your own name server for domains that you register with fasthosts.com. Of course, this works with every other registrar as well, although the procedure might differ a little bit. We will use the ISPConfig 3 server as the primary name server and also acting as the secondary. This may be suited best to a single server setup. To do this, you need one server with ISPConfig 3 installed and a Fast hosts account.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-run-your-own-name-server-with-ispconfig-3-and-fast-hosts

Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool
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Some of you may know the commercial Flexnet Licencing Application (©Macrovision). It's a client-server based solution for managing the usage of so called Flexnet-enabled applications. You can hold licenses of more than one product on one license-server. As you typically have to buy licenses and licenses can be expensive it would be nice to have a monitoring solution, to see the utilization of the precious licenses, wether they are underutilized (so money is wasted) or are always fully utilized (so that you can suspect that sometimes people cannot do their work, or only delayed) which is also a waste of resources. As far as I know there are commercial applications for performing such reports, but again you have to spend money. Why not build a simple system yourself, which shows the actual and past usage in an "MRTG style"?

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/flexnet-license-monitoring-with-rrdtool

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