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System Administration
Change hard drive's sleep/standby mode timer to reduce power consumption Depends on your system's usage and environment the time your hard drive is in idle state may wary. Every time a hard drive has nothing to do it waits certain period of time and then it enters sleep mode. To enter the sleep/standby mode, had drive has to park it's head and stops plate spin. by reducing a timer before hard drive goes to sleep mode we can save some energy.
Use hdparm command to determine what is the current enter sleep mode timer value (APM LEVEL): 
# hdparm -B /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 APM_level	= 254

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System Administration
Most of the non-SSD hard drives allow for a noise reduction by decreasing head movement speed while accessing data. This ability is called Automatic Acoustic Management or AAM. This tutorial will show how to manipulate AAM values to reduce or increase head movement thus directly affect hard drive's noise level.
The best tool for this job is hdparm. hdparm is available for all major Linux distributions and is available for install via hdparm package. If hdparm command is not available on your system yet, you can install it using following linux commands: 
UBUNTU/DEBIAN
# apt-get install hdparm
OR
FEDORA/RED HAT
# yum install hdparm
First find a correct block device for a hard drive you would like to work with. This can be done by: 
]$ lsscsi -g
[2:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      HTS721060G9SA00  MC3I  /dev/sda   /dev/sg0

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System Administration
The easiest way to obtain hard drive's model information is to use smartmontools and its smartctl command. If you do not have smartmontools package installed on your system yet you can do so by: 
UBUNTU:
# apt-get install smartmontools
FEDORA:
# yum install smartmontools

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System Administration
If you are a strong command line user, performing package search and installations using command line package manager yum you may have noticed a frequent metadata updates when using this tool: 
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
google-chrome   
rpmfusion-free-updates     
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates     
updates/20/x86_64/metalink
updates
virtualbox 
updates/20/x86_64/primary_db
Although, this behavior is intentional and provides many benefits in order to keep your software updated, it can also however be quite frustrating if you see and have to wait for this update to finish couple times a day. The default expiry time of system's metadata is 90 minutes, and therefor every time 1,5 hour elapses your system will download new repository updates. For a production server this poses not obstacle or problem. However, for desktop systems this feature can be quite annoying.

Details
System Administration
Master PDF editor is a powerful tool to create or edit existing PDF documents. In case Master PDF editor is not available for your Linux distribution via standard repository then keep reading to find out how to install this software on any Linux System. Just a word of warning though, This is a proprietary software which means that you have absolutely no control of it and therefore, you run it on your own risk.
The only requirement for this software to work is a functional Graphical User Interface.
Master PDF Editor comes as a pre-compiled tarball and in the form of installable DEB and RPM package.

Details
System Administration

There may be a time that you wish to clear a Memory on your server. Normally you do not want to fiddle with it so do it only you are sure that it is necessary and that it would not affect your server's performance. For this we can use sysctl command which allows linux admins to configure kernel parameters at runtime.

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System Administration

Introduction

In this configuration tutorial we will guide you through the process of configuring sendmail to be an email relay for your gmail or google apps account. This allows you to send email from your bash scripts, hosted website or from command line using mail command. Other examples where you can utilize this setting is for a notification purposes such or failed backups etc. Sendmail is just one of many utilities which can be configured to rely on gmail account where the others include postfix, exim , ssmpt etc. In this tutorial we will use Debian and sendmail for this task.

Install prerequisites

# apt-get install sendmail mailutils sendmail-bin 

Create Gmail Authentication file

# mkdir -m 700 /etc/mail/authinfo/
# cd /etc/mail/authinfo/

next we need to create an auth file with a following content. File can have any name, in this example the name is gmail-auth:

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System Administration

Once you downloaded a Raspberry PI *.img file you may have a reason to look inside the image. Here is a shot config on how you do it:

First get your image file:

# ls -lh
total 1.9G
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.9G Apr 24 14:35 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img

Details
System Administration

Hostgator VPS generates apache's httpd.conf file automatically. Therefore, any new lines you add to apache's configuration file will be overwritten. In order to add new configuration settings we need to include a configuration. Open up your main config file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and search for a virtual host with the domain name you wish to edit. Last two lines of your virtual host should look similar to this:

# To customize this VirtualHost use an include file at the following location
#    Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/linuxcon/linuxconfig.org/*.conf"

uncomment the Include line by remove leading "#".

Next, create a directory to reflect the Include location:

# mkdir -p /usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/linuxcon/linuxconfig.org/

Details
System Administration

What is DHCP?

Anyone with a basic knowledge of computer networking knows that for two hosts to communicate on the same network using TCP/IP model, both hosts need to have a unique IP address. There are two ways on how any given host on your network can obtain an IP address.

One way is to manually configure the network interface and assign an IP address by hand. The manual network configuration is called static configuration, which means that host's IP address does not change its IP address unless changed manually by the user or system administrator. If your company network includes more than 1000 hosts, the job of configuring each host with a static IP address becomes tiresome and more importantly extremely inefficient.

Another way to assign your network hosts with a proper IP address regardless of the actual network size is to assign an IP address to each host automatically. To perform an automatic host's IP configuration is where DHCP ( Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ) comes handy.

The DHCP protocol lets a DHCP client, that is your network host to lease network configuration parameters such as an IP address. In fact, lease parameters are not limited to IP address only as they may also include the following configuration settings:

  • IP addresses and network masks
  • Domain Names servers ( DNS )
  • Default Gateways
  • WINS servers
  • Syslog hosts
  • Proxy servers
  • NTP servers
  • X Font servers
  • Syslog hosts

Details
System Administration

Objective

The following tutorial explains how to mount USB drive in Linux system using terminal and shell command line. If you are using desktop manager, you will most likely be able to use it to mount USB drive for you.

Mounting USB drive is no different than mounting USB stick or even a regular SATA drive. The video example below will illustrate the entire process of mounting USB drive on Linux system. To gain more understating read the subsequent paragraphs.

Conventions

Details
System Administration

This article describes the basic logic behind the Linux logical volume manager by showing real examples of configuration and usage. Although Debian Linux will be used for this tutorial, the same commands can be applied on other Linux distributions.

In this tutorial you will learn:
  • Basic lvm concepts
  • How to manage phisical volumes, logical volumes and volume groups

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