I ran into this article about how you can seamlessly run Windows Applications from within Ubunutu. The author is using VMware, rdesktop (apt-get install rdesktop), and Seamless RDP.

http://hehe2.net/thedarkside/microsoft/run-windows-apps-100-seamlessly-o...

Just a heads up, if you do decide to enable OpenSSL so you can do encrypted MySQL replication. There are two bugs that will affect replication and the mysqldump command. They're as follows:

Bug #24148 regression tests hang with SSL enabled
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=24148
http://lists.mysql.com/commits/17286

Bug #27669 mysqldump: Got error: 2026: SSL connection error when trying to connect
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=27669
http://lists.mysql.com/commits/24329

This may cause lots of problems with MySQL and SSL Replication using OpenSSL.

Cheers!

This nifty little script allows you to monitor log files for instances of brute forcing as well as popular exploits that show up in your server logs files. Anyone that has many servers should check this out.

BFD (Brute Force Detector) Home Page

There is also a nice little write up of how to implement BFD without AFP and some extended rules.

BFD rules for Jag servers

If you're using Exim4 and PHP as a module or as a CGI with suexec. You may have noticed some issues with your mail. Specifically you would have noticed that either the "From:" header was using "nobody@machinename" or "user@machine name, its also possibly that you had an additional header called "Sender:".

There are two things you need to do to fix this. You first need to make sure that your "php.ini" has the following value "sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i". Which is the default, double check this variable as it might be set to something else.

AutoMySQLBackup is a shell script that allows daily, weekly and monthly backups of your local and remote MySQL Databases. It's meant to run on Linux/Unix through a cron job. Its highly configurable, and easy to setup as I will show you today!

First you will need to acquire the shell script and drop it on your server. You can download AutoMySQLBackup on their SourceForge Project Page

XCache is an opcode cacher for PHP developed by the Lighttpd team. The full description directly from http://xcache.lighttpd.net/

So lets say you have a server with a bunch of users and they all have sites and data and you don't want them to be able to see each others data. A lot of distributions aren't setup to stop users from wandering and reading files within other users directories.

I stumbled upon a little application called "evtsys" that was created by some Computer Engineering folks at Purdue University. The program runs on Microsft Windows 2000/2003/Vista 32-bit or 64-bit version and sends eventlog messages to a networked syslog server. You can then have syslog either print out the alert or write to a file.

Heres an article that helped me with an issue over at a friends site http://www.ftatalk.com
Their site was exploding and they need to tune out the current server as much as possible. One thing that I noticed was that MySQL wasn't tuned properly. So After making some changes and finding out that there was no thread caching, I searched the web and found this article.

Wow, it's been a busy week. I was totally swamped for several days dealing with the remember.yahoo.com MySQL servers and related stuff. And then I used a day or two to recover (sleep, shower, etc).
Anyway, I made some interesting discoveries along the way. The most surprising one had to do with thread caching on Linux when you have a busy MySQL server--busy in a particular way, mind you.

Read the full article at jeremy.zawodny.com

***UPDATE*** I have moved ftatalk.com over to lighttpd and its doing wonders! You can also check out the ftatalk.com mirror at http://www.satfix.net
I will also be writing an article about lighttpd and how it can help you get the most out of your hardware.

If you've ever required OpenSSL support enabled for MySQL Server 5.0 under debian, then you will need to recompile MySQL. Under Debian this is very easy.

The following article from howtoforge.com shows how to setup the perfect Linux Desktop using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. If you've always wanted to use Ubuntu as your desktop OS, then give this article a read and follow along using a Virtual Machine or VMWare Player.

If you have ever ran into a problem with trying to strace apache or other processes that spawn children, then this script will help you out greatly. This small perl script will grab all of the PID's of the current process and its children and then run an strace command on all of them to provide strace output from all of apache. You can modify the strace line to your liking as well as the log names, by default it logs to a file based on date and time to the /tmp directory. Code included, click 'Read More'.