Unix Howto

People often (yes, really) ask me which audio podcasts I listen to and which video ones I watch. I have recently rationalised my list as I migrated from iTunes on the Mac to gPodder on Ubuntu.

I thought now would be a good time to publish the list of what I subscribe to. I’ve attached an OPML file that was exported from gPodder (subscriptions -> export to OPML file). You can just import that OPML into your podcast client, or just open in a text editor and pluck out the interesting URLs and use those instead.

I don’t listen to every episode of every podcast, but usually I get around to most of them at some point. A couple of them might be unsuitable for minors, specifically the ones involving Richard Herring, and Answer Me This! The rest are pretty mainstream. They’re in all sorts of formats – mostly MP3 or M4V because the feeds came originally from when I was using iTunes.
I’m interested to know if you have podcasts that you like and you think I might enjoy, let me know in the comments, or if you’re brave, post your OPML file. Make sure to remove any podcasts that you might have paid for, and that have username/passwords in the URL.

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Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Lenny

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian
Lenny server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics
about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage,
CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much
configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like
Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a
restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The
combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets
you recognize current or upcoming problems (like “We need a bigger
server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly.”), and a watchdog
that ensures the availability of the monitored services.


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Changing From SquirrelMail To RoundCube On Your ISPConfig3 Server

This tutorial has been created for those who have installed The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.4 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]
and do not like SquirrelMail as webmail client. Here’s a guide to
replace SquirrelMail with RoundCube, which is more visually attractive
and easier to manage for our clients.


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High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS On Fedora 12 - Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Fedora 12) that use GlusterFS.
Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and
files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The
client system (Fedora 12 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.


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Fully Utilizing Your X-Core CPU

Almost all systems sold nowadays have at least a dual-core CPU, even
triple- or quad-cores are getting cheaper and getting standard in the
near future. But how to utilize your shiny x-core to it’s full
potential, with applications that are only utilizing one core ? With
Linux, which has strong multitasking capabilities as all unixoid
operating systems, there is an easy possibility to parallelize tasks
which are normally only using one core of an x-core CPU.


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Using WebDAV With ISPConfig 3 On Ubuntu 9.10

This guide explains how to set up and use WebDAV on a web site
created with ISPConfig 3 on an Ubuntu 9.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning
and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to
directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be
downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to
upload and download files.


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Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Fedora 12

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers
(running Fedora 12) to one large storage server (distributed storage)
with GlusterFS.
The client system (Fedora 12 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.


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