ipHouse Products
LogicMonitor and /server-status
Mar 9th
One of the many cool things LogicMonitor can do is auto-discover your Apache web server and collect server statistics on it. This requires that the server have the mod_status module enabled, and that the LogicMonitor agent have access to the server-status page.
Normally, this is controlled by a Location block in the Apache server configuration, which associates the server-status handler with the URL path. Since you probably don’t want to let the world know exactly what your server’s doing, the block also defines which hostnames or IP addresses are allowed to get access to it.
Putting together a new webhost server
Mar 2nd
We’ve been putting together a new webhost server this week, to serve as a front-end for customers of our UNIX web hosting services to upload content. When we built the previous server, the only file transfer service we could support with our virtual account system was FTP. But with the march of time, our ability to provide better has improved.
The new webhost server provides both FTP and encrypted SFTP file upload, and basic shell access via SSH for file management. Shell access also enables publishing and managing your content via version control systems like GIT and SVN.
Part of my work on the new server involved reconfiguring the webhost control panel software, which was mostly written years ago. Its always interesting to revisit old projects, to see how the state of the art and your own skills have evolved over the years. In this case, I think I have some better ideas for implementing the control panel better, with better integration with our current account systems and more features for our customers. That’ll be a longer project, though.
Colo to Virtual Data Center Success – January, 2012
Feb 7th
Back in October, 2011, I had posted an article titled ‘Colocation is so 1990s…‘ discussing why I feel colocation is going the way of the dodo for most SMB business needs, and really, it isn’t as efficient as using a virtual data center anyway.
In the middle of January I helped someone move away from colocation into our vmForge VDC service offering.
Think in the cloud but without the variable monthly billing or non-persistent storage.
“virtual data center” has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?
Debugging IPSec VPNs in FortiGate
Jan 20th
Debugging IPSec VPNs in FortiGate
Debugging what is going wrong with a VPN setup is difficult. The IKE protocol is “chatty”, and negotiates back and forth between the two ends for several rounds. The GUI offers not much help, it is either UP or Down. Most of the real debugging happens inside the CLI.
One problem in particular that has always bugged me is that you need access to the end machines involved to initiate traffic across the link. The network admin typically doesn’t have direct access on the computers on either side of the VPN in order to initiate that traffic. I’ll show you a method that can be used to initiate traffic from that network as well.
More >
Clone-tastic!
Jan 20th
There are many things about virtualization is the ability to clone virtual machines. It’s really cool! Unfortunately, after you work with virtualization for a while you start to take it for granted. I can’t tell you how many times I roll out a new physical machine and sigh because I can’t simply clone it. Well, I can but that’s a discussion for another day.
More >
