One of the Most important aspects of any Web based solutions provider is monitoring what’s actually happening with your machines and what your customers are currently viewing, a key aspect of this is being able to monitor the traffic levels into your machine, to ensure accurate monitoring you need to ideally host these machines offsite on a completely different network to your hosted machines in order to get a third eye view on how things look.

So if you have your hosted servers currently with another provider , have a look at Dediserves current solutions which all make excellent third party monitoring servers. Below i have listed the five most powerful opensource monitoring tools which all run easily on dediserves servers.

1. MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is primarily designed to monitor and graph traffic on network links. It is written in Perl, generates HTML with PNG image graphs, updated at configurable intervals. One of the best features is that it creates daily, weekly, and monthly graphs as well. You can monitor any SNMP variable you choose. MRTG is one of the most popular tools  for network monitoring and is used widely in industry.

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Here at dediserve, we understand the massive importance security plays in the day to day management of the data on your server, in a recent blog post we went through a short tutorial on setting up IPTables on your Virtual Server.

As a follow up to that blog post we will now look at an additional peice of opensource software that will enhance the use of IPtables whilst reducing the amount of work needed in terms of administration on your server.

This is done by installing and setting up the opensource Fail2ban software on your linux virtual machine – Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules dynamically to reject the IP address.

For this installation i will be using Ubuntu 8.04:

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One of the most important aspects of managing your linux virtual server , is to know what exactly your server is up to at any one time.

Being on top of this allows you to tweak your server for better performance dynamically before your load times start to suffer.

You should look out for issues Including:

• Storage bottlenecks
• CPU and Memory Bottlenecks
• Network Bottlenecks

All these have the ability to slow down and undermine the performance of your server. Below i will provide some free/opensource monitoring tools you can use to access this information via the command line on your linux server.

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We here at dediserve have stressed before the vital importance that back-ups play with your data, at dediserve we provide you with the ability to switch on automatic daily/weekly and monthly back-ups as well as two manual back-ups. Or you can simply take up to five manual back-ups as well.However not everyone is lucky enough to have their back-ups looked after by dediserve .

So i have put together a list of free opensource back-ups tool which can be easily installed and set-up on any linux based server.

CloneZilla

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

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We’re happy to announce that we should be able to launch the Fedora linux template to our product offerings this week. This is as a direct result of customer feedback and what you wanted added.

I’ll post an update as soon as we have the template live. In the meantime feel free to leave any feedback you might have on additional templates , or functionality you would like to see added. We are continuously adding improvements to our systems to provide the best VPS product in the marketplace.

With the ever increasing demand of more and more internet traffic , one of the most important facets of any popular website is being able to handle that traffic and remain stable and fast. Downtime can be disastrous forcing customers and also revenue to look elsewhere.

What can be done? The solution is simple, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. This can be achieved by using hardware and software to build out highly redundant and highly scalable network services. One of the most popular methods is currently load balancing your site across multiple machines.

Load balancing as defined in wikipedia is the following:

a technique to distribute workload evenly across two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancing service is usually provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a multilayer switch or a DNS server).

Now thanks to the Linux Virtual Server Project and the growth of Xen powered Virtual Servers provided by that great company dediserve.com , you can now very simply and very cheaply build out your own load balanced cluster for as little as €80 per month.

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As a follow on from the django framework post i wrote about previously , i will now talk about a second framework that we also offer pre-installed on our virtual servers, which is probably the fastest growing framework out there today and thats Ruby on rails , RoR is also an opensource web application framework for the ruby programming language and is used for rapid development.

As your VPS comes already pre-installed and pre-configured with the RoR saving you time and hassle, you can login straight away and start configuring your app/site.

If your New to RoR, you can, via the RoR website  follow the step by step screencast to building your own blog engine. Which will give you a good overview of the power and flexibility of this framework.

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As a server provider we constantly speak with customers about the best architecture for their server set-up. Ideally you are looking to provide a redundant, scalable server cluster with a good spec on a redundant platform at a good price.

This is something Dediserve can now provide at exceptional value , via a single user interface you can easily manage multiple virtual machines all running different technologies , you can have a dedicated mail server , database server and web server in your own virtualized cluster for as little as  €60 per month, and easily upgrade each individual server as the requirement of that server grows, meaning if you have a large database but small website , easily upgrade the database server to handle the added load whilst leaving the web server as is.

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One of the most daunting aspects of server management that often scares and confuses people is the “command line” this is the black screen you see when you first SSH into your server. Being able to manage your server via the command line is a great skill to have but like most skills takes time to learn and master.

One of the best ways to circumnavigate this issue is to simple install a graphical user interface on the server. What this control panel allows you to do is to more easily manage your server via a more user friendly control panel.

One such control panel that we have pre-installed on our centos virtual servers is a control panel called Virtualmin.

Virtualmin as described via their website:

Virtualmin is a powerful and flexible web server control panel based on the well-known Open Source web-based systems management GUI, Webmin. Manage your virtual domains, mailboxes, databases, applications, and the entire server, from one comprehensive and friendly interface.

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Asterisk is the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit

Asterisk can be configured as the core of an IP or hybrid PBX, switching calls, managing routes, enabling features, and connecting callers with the outside world over IP, analog (POTS), and digital (T1/E1) connections.

To avail of this superb piece of opensource technology simple sign up for our virtual server with the pre-installed asterisk template and start configuring your telephony server.

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