David Latham

I am sure I have never encountered a person at the grand age of 84 learning Linux before today. As it turned out I sold a Fedora 10 DVD from my website ( www.thelinuxcdstore.com ) to a gentleman in Auckland who needed some help. Usually I shy away from supporting Linux unless it is something related to the media I sell. In this particular case I needed to get involved because I needed to determine where the problem my customer had came from. We got on the phone together and I ran up a fresh install of Fedora 10 on a VMWare Virtual machine so I could guide the customer through the install. Considering the initial failure as the customer described it was most likely related to Anaconda, I decided that a text install might be more successful. Fedora keeps the text installer hidden. You have to hit the TAB key to edit the boot parameters when the DVD boots up and add the word "text" at the end of the line. After that the DVD boots into a TEXT only installer. We had a scary

Following on from my previous post about setting up a reverse proxy in Fedora 10, I now delve into high availability. The plan here is to create two reverse proxy servers and cluster them together in an Active / Passive configuration with automatic fail-over. So here is our trusty network diagram: You will notice the shared IP and Proxy02 with connected to Proxy01 with the cross-over cable. You need the cross-over cable for the heartbeat keep-alive messages. As I am using VMWare I have used the HOST ONLY network configuration for the second nics on the servers thus simulating a physical cross-over cable. Here is the network configuration on each proxy server: Proxy01: eth0- ( same network and subnet as the client ) IP =192.168.0.11 SUBNET MASK=255.255.255.0 DEFAULT GW =192.168.0.1 HOSTNAME = proxy01.latham.internal eth1 - ( different network and subnet as the client ) IP = 192.168.169.11 SUBNET MASK = 255.255.255.0 DEFAULT GW = none Pr

I was given the enviable task of setting up a reverse proxy in Fedora. A reverse proxy is a piece of software that is installed on a device that has network access to an external and internal network. The proxy acts as a bridge between the two networks. A normal proxy as installed in most company networks allows all users on the internal network to access the external network. A reverse proxy allows clients on the external network to access services hosted on the internal network. It can be installed on the front end of the network and will proxy specified traffic through to the internal network. Here is a diagram of my lab network. In this example we can see: Multiple clients are connecting to the proxy cluster. ( more on clustering in the next article. ) Only one node in the cluster has possession of the shared IP address. The Apache web service on the proxies are configured to listen on the shared IP address. The host web server behind the resource zone is serving traffic to th

In order to reliably burn an ISO image to CD or DVD there are a couple of options that need to be set. That's if you are planning on using terminal commands ( command line tools ) to do the job. The disk must be written in DAO ( Disk At Once ) also known as SAO ( Session At Once ) The disk must be written in as slow a speed as possible. On my PC that is about 8x for a CD and 4x for a DVD. Remember speed ratios differ between DVD and CD. My Scripts: ( saved in /usr/local/bin ) [dave@fedora10 bin]$ cat burn-cd #/bin/bash #burn CD # Usage - Enter full path to distro here. /usr/bin/wodim dev=/dev/sr0 driveropts=burnfree fs=14M speed=9 -dao -v -eject $1 [dave@fedora10 bin]$ cat burn-dvd #/bin/bash #burn CD # Usage - Enter full path to distro here. /usr/bin/wodim dev=/dev/sr0 driveropts=burnfree fs=14M speed=4 -dao -v -eject $1 The options for wodim ( cdrecord as it is called nowdays ) Note the Speed, Burnfree and -dao options. -dao tells Wodim that you want to burn the ISO image in