Linux

Creating a PXE Deployment server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Dale Macartney 2 Comments

If you currently don’t have any structured means of managing deployments of Standard Operating Environments (SOE’s) in your organization, I seriously urge you to read on as learning how to deploy images over a network connection will save you a huge amount of time.

This guide will walk you through setting up a PXE boot server for you to deploy any form of network bootable operating systems.

A bit of background on this topic as to new users this will or is already a very confusing topic.
For starters, there is no such software called a “pxe server”. A PXE implementation is simply a combination of DHCP and a normal TFTP Server. The reason it is called PXE is because this is an acronym for “Preboot Execution Environment”.

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Deploying a software based Load Balancer using IPVS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Dale Macartney 3 Comments

From time to time, you may have a requirement for looking into or even deploying a Load Balancing solution which will allow you to scale your platform to a larger implementation than what an individual server could give you.

You may have or be looking into deploying a farm of web servers, proxy servers or any other type of platform. All of which may be stand alone installations however you wish to achieve a single point of communication for your users.

If we take a web server environment for an example,
Lets say we would like to have www.example.com always present yet scalable and redundant for future growth. If we have this website running on a single web server, we have not only have a single point of failure, but we also have a limitation on capacity as we only have the local resources of that one server to scale with.

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Deploying a replicated NAS solution using Red Hat Storage Server 2.0

Dale Macartney Leave a comment

Before I begin, I’d like to thank Gavin Spurgeon for his assistance in verifying my work and assisting in my understanding of the technologies used here. Up until recently this technology was a new topic for me. Thanks Gav.

All customers who have any sized infrastructure, be it large or small, will require a storage solution of some form. The solution of choice will always be subject to finding the right solution for the job. This could be a standard file server for small customers, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or in the case of medium to large sized infrastructures, even a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN (Storage Area Network).

This article will focus specifically on NAS type solutions, however will reference in comparison to file servers and SAN solutions in parts.
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Bandwidth throttling with rsync

Dale Macartney Leave a comment

Throttling throughput in rsync is actually really simple to do. All the information you need to know is in the man pages for rsync, but it is so very surprising to see how many people asking for an answer on the web.

You may have a need from time to time to rsync some data from one location to another, but you may be concerned of either saturating your link to your remote location or getting a hefty bill at the end of the month for over usage.

This is normally common if you were to be syncing via a VPN or internet uplink.

For example, lets say you have a contract with your internet provider to give you internet connectivity and your contractual arrangement is for 10MB/s. However, your supplier gives you a 1Gbps link on a 95 percentile agreement.

Basically this means you are paying for your 10MB/s, but you won’t be hit with a bill for excess usage unless you go over 10MB/s for more than 5% of your allotted billing period.

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How to backup / restore FreeIPA 2.2.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Dale Macartney 5 Comments

FreeIPA is a new technology which gives you many features in the areas of Identity management, host based security control as well as user based security control over your Linux infrastructure.

FreeIPA is designed to give centralised management capabilities over Linux, in a way similar to Microsoft Active Directory has over a Windows estate.

If you would like to find out more about FreeIPA, head across to the project wiki which you can find here.

For those of you who are already running FreeIPA, and looking for information about backing up and restoring your environment. Please read on.

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