by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Jul 22, 2009 | Linux
QOS – “Quality of service” – what a fancy name for somethings that will allow you to manage the available bandwidth for your servers/pcs/equipments. Usually setting up QOS is not “so fancy” to setup and manage. At work I had to setup a QOS for a custumer and didn’t want to be writing rules on my own so I searched a bit and found MasterShaper.
You can read more about it here.
Lets imagine that you want to allow p2p on your network but you don’t want to waste all your bandwidth on that kind of traffic, after all you still need bandwidth for your VOIP, http, and mail traffic.
To setup this I’ll be using CentOS and Mastershaper.
After installing a VMware virtual machine with CentOS (default install with 2 network cards), I’ve setup apache, this time I didn’t use virtualhosts or any other extras as I just wanted to create a single purpose system.
To start I’ve concufigured 2 network interfaces (internal/external)
eth0 192.168.251.249 (external)
eth1 192.168.252.249 (internal)
After downloading MasterShaper decompress it to:
/var/www/html
Install pear and pear modules as described in MasterShapper docs.
And finally create the mysql database to support the installation.
I won’t get into install details (just follow the documentation), but in the end you be able to define schedulers, hosts and services with higher or lower priority and in the end you’ll also be able to monitor all this in a pretty web interface with some graphics.
Just don’t forget to install mysql support in php, and pear, you’ll also have to configure sudo but in the end just read the documentation in mastershaper it’s very good.
by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Jul 15, 2009 | Linux
Today I’ll be writing about something I’m working for a few years now, it’s been my favorite project since I’m working in DRI (www.dri.pt) and one of the most successful ones in my carer. I’m talking about MTB (Mind the Box).
MTB or Mind the box is not a product (but it can be called one), or technology, MTB is a concept and a brand. Why? Well, MTB is made of a bunch of open source technologies all together, and it doesn’t aim to be a closed and focused solution. In the end MTB is a solution to multiple problematics in having a remote desktop in a clod somewhere near(or not so near) you.
Enough of cheap chat and lets get going into the detail and how things get together. MTB has various solutions to deploy remote desktops, each focused in the objective the sys admin, administration wants, usually in the following configurations:
Remote environment server
Remote application server
PXE boot server
Remote desktop server / PXE boot server
As you may already know there are very big players in this area, MS, Citrix,VMware,NX, and so on, but what makes us different from others is the flexibility that MTB offers. I’m not talking about available applications and easy access to the Desktop Server although MTB can deploys all applications available to Linux these days.
I’m talking about MTB copping with the vast heterogeneous systems out there (it’s available to SUN Solaris, Linux x86, Linux x86_64, and IBM zSeries), and at the same time being able to be flexible and manage the “weird” expectations of some of the clients. Yes I wrote weird because you don’t imagine some of the integrations that were made using MTB, Java desktops and appliances, authentication methods, client availability for legacy systems (do you know that some banks out there still use OS2 as the main desktop?), and so on…
MTB is deployed in financial institutions with all the demand for safety and security procedures, and also in schools from the primary to high school and still manage to keep its users happy (including teachers), and at the same time in the normal enterprise environment. That’s the flexibility I’m talking about. I can also talk about performance, bandwidth usage, and so on, but that’s for another time.
If you want to check it out on your on go to www.mindthebox.com or www.dri.com
