For a public surfstation available for free we needed to have a system, that just simply always works. No user should be able to reset any configuration-settins, change the wallpaper, modify favorites or anything like that. The decision of the operating system was easy: Linux! The needed tasks to install this system are the following: [...]
In order to move our Nagios installation from a virtual server to a dedicated hardware machine i installed Debian Lenny on a HP Proliant DL 380 G5. This server has two integrated NICs which can easily be used together as a network bond. So if one way to or from the server failes, the machine [...]
Running services on a virtual server sometimes causes problems. I often faced such porblems by reaching the maximum amount of open files. In that case applications like Apache or Postfix fill up their logs with lines like this:
"Too many open files in system"
I wanted to be able to monitor the amount of open files on my server (OpenVZ/ Virtuozzo) to easily see when there were and also when there might be problems. I decided to give Munin a try. Installation and basic Configuration was really simple and what I like very much is that custom plugins can be written very quickly with basic knowlegde of bash or perl.
Attached is my munin plugin. Just copy it to /etc/munin/plugins (in the default installation of munin) and rename it to vserver_open_files. Also add following lines to the file /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node, because this plugin needs to run with root privileges.
http://www.schmalenegger.com/files/vserver_open_files.sh
Since a few days ago i only used mutt directly on my server where the fully-loaded and configured postfix was running. The setup always worked and still works fine, but i wanted to use mutt also on a different machine and still be able to send mail via smtp through my postfix on the server.
As I don’t want to use postfix for this simple “mail-forwarding” job, i googled a bit through the interface and found msmtp.
Today i tried to insert data to a mysql-database from a sql-dump with phpmyadmin. Although the dumpfile was not so big (1,8M) i got a timeout after about 30 secondes each time I tried it. This timeout is often by webhosters in their PHP installation.
The problem is that the customer (me in this case) is not able to increase this value 
So what to do?
After googling a bit I found the solution: It’s called Bigdump! Wow!!! 
A few days ago I switched the webserver for schmalenegger.com from Apache2 to lighttpd. Here’s a short guide what needs to be done to get lighttpd running with Wordpress:
As I use Debian Etch, I decided to give to lighty packet from the Debian repositories a shot.
After installation the webserver needs to be configured. This is done in the file /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.
Debian uses a separate user for the maintanance of MySQL. That user is called debian-sys-maint and will be created automatically when you install MySQL. If you accidentally delete that user or import an old dump with the “mysql” user database, the MySQL init-script will complain with such an error-message:
Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)
In that case you should recreate that user with the following steps:
1. Get the password of the user from /etc/mysql/debian.cnf
Sometimes when working with an image you want to make a certain color transparent. When working with a gif file this would make a round circle look round on any color background. This is actually very simple once you do it once. Finding the information for this took me a while so I thought I would pass it on to anyone that was interested.
1. Open the image in gimp
Change window: Twice Ctrl+W
Scale both windows to the same size: Ctrl+W,=
Put “Diff” to the other window (“diff put”): dp
Get “Diff” from other window (“diff obtain”): do