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smtp-delay is an add-on/plug-in intended for use with qmail. It was written primarily to add banner delays and antipipelining to qmail. These two features are known to be able to block certain types of spam and virus mail sent through non-rfc-compliant SMTP engines. When I looked around for programs to add this functionality to qmail, I found only one such program, and didn't like the way it was done. BTW...I have the same objections to the way its done in sendmail 8.13.x. Since banner delays (the server pausing for some time before issuing an SMTP banner) cause every SMTP connection to take longer, I thought it would be a good idea to somehow exempt "legitimate" mail servers...or at least not subject them to long banner delays. So I decided to tune the banner delay time based on the connecting IP's reverse DNS. IPs with no rDNS get treated the worst (longest banner delay). IPs with rDNS matching a regex intended to detect dynamic/end-user IPs get a moderate delay. All other IPs get a very short banner delay...just long enough to see if they immediately pipeline (send SMTP commands before the banner's been sent). The original intent for smtp-delay was that it should be run before rblsmtpd, and simply set the RBLSMTPD environment variable if applicable, letting rblsmtpd issue the 4xx response. Pretty early on, I realized smtp-delay should be able to run standalone (without dependence on rblsmtpd to do its talking) and issue a 4xx response on its own. Lately, the spam load against our mail cluster has gotten so bad that I've started running smtp-delay after rblsmtpd, based on the idea that there's no point waiting out a long banner delay holding an open socket to an IP we have no intention of accepting mail from anyway. This reduced our concurrency by about 20%.

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load. We tested several free software tools that do such testing to see which work best for what kinds of sites. If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer maintained, non-free, or fail the installation process in some obscure way, you are left with five candidates: curl-loader, httperf, Siege, Tsung, and Apache JMeter.

This article explains how you can install and configure apache2-mpm-peruser on a Debian Etch server. apache2-mpm-peruser is an MPM (Multi-Processing Module) for the Apache 2 web server, very similar to apache2-mpm-itk, but faster (almost as fast as apache2-mpm-prefork). mpm-peruser allows you to run each of your vhosts under a separate UID and GID - in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts. It is based on metuxmpm, a working implementation of the perchild MPM. The result is a sane and secure web server environment for your users, without kludges like PHP's safe_mode.

I wrote the program "throttle.c," which you can insert into the tcpserver chain of commands for a qmail smtpd server. It takes one argument: the number of kilobytes per second to let through on the incoming file descriptor. Throttle does not throttle the outgoing file descriptor, because that's usually just status from your mail server. Additionally, throttle will set an alarm, so that any session longer than 15 minutes will expire and disconnect. This affords some amount of protection against lingering sessions that eat up your parallelism limit; I've seen such sessions from presumably trojaned DSL machines connecting to the mail server to send spam.

Many new admin or Linux users get frustrated when their remote Linux box is not accessible dues to network connectivity. In this article I will try to provide tools and information about how to diagnose network configurations. You can try these tips/tools to diagnose an issue of Linux network connectivity to remote or local servers.

OpenNebula transforms a physical cluster into a flexible virtual infrastructure which dynamically adapts to the changing demands of a service workload. OpenNebula leverages existing virtualization platforms to create a new virtualization layer between the service and the physical infrastructure. This new layer supports the execution of the services on a physical cluster, extending the benefits of VMMs (Virtual Machine Monitors) from a single physical resource to a cluster of resources. OpenNebula effectively decouples a server (deployed as a pre-configured VM) not only from the physical infrastructure but also from its physical location.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) server system (i386). You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files (apart from a fixed Ubuntu Xen kernel to enable networking for the virtual machines) or compilation are needed.

1.4.11 got a new module for streaming Flash movie files called mod_flv_streaming. This module allows you to seek in FLV files using the high performance infrastructure of lighttpd. The idea is simple and explained and implemented on ‘Streaming’ flv video via PHP, take two at http://www.flashcomguru.com/ But instead of streaming the file through PHP we do it in the webserver. The module expects a request for the URL which matches flv-streaming.extensions and can handle a ’?start=’ as part of the request. The information to pass into the ‘start’ parameter is extractly by the flash-player from the meta-data of the flv-files. The meta-data can be setup with flvtool2 Now I leave it to you to combine this with mod_secdownload to create a flv-streaming server for free with deep/hot linking protected movies. server.modules = ( ..., "mod_secdownload", ## optional "mod_flv_streaming", ... ) flv-streaming.extensions = ( ".flv" ) Take the flash-player from flashcomguru and adjust the URL in the player and try yourself.

sudo aptitude install update-manager-core

This tutorial shows how to set up a two-node Apache web server cluster that provides high-availability. In front of the Apache cluster we create a load balancer that splits up incoming requests between the two Apache nodes. Because we do not want the load balancer to become another "Single Point Of Failure", we must provide high-availability for the load balancer, too. Therefore our load balancer will in fact consist out of two load balancer nodes that monitor each other using heartbeat, and if one load balancer fails, the other takes over silently.