With the advances in technology, faster data access (SSD), and slimming hardware footprints, legacy technologies are typically the first cuts made to get these devices thinner and lighter while making them more powerful and efficient. Installing OS X has never really been a particularly difficult task, but try doing that on a MacBook Air or a system with a broken optical drive. Not so easy anymore is it? Even downloading the OS from the Mac App Store wouldn't do when the hard drive needs replacing or the Recovery Partition is corrupt. Luckily, Macs have a couple of options, specifically USB booting, and since most have an SD card slot, we can use those as well. Creating a USB Installer for Apple OS X 10.7-10.8 Before proceeding, we'll need the following items to complete the process: 8GB USB Flash Drive (or SD Card) Install OS X Mountain Lion.app (installer downloaded from Mac App Store) Apple computer with Mac App Store (OS X 10.6.8+) User Account with Administrative privileges Follow these steps: 1.     Using a Mac with at least OS X 10.6.8 installed, access the Mac App Store and download the Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8) app installer. 2.     Insert the USB drive into the Mac and launch Disk Utility. 3.     Click on the USB drive from the left-hand menu and select the Partition tab. 4.     Click the drop-down menu, selecting 1 partition. 5.     Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the format-type from the drop-down menu. (Figure A) 6.     Click on the Options button and select the radio button for GUID Partition Table and click OK.  (Figure…

Today we are thrilled to announce that developers can now launch Droplets in our newest region, London, United Kingdom. Our community has been requesting a UK region for a while now, and we’re excited to announce that it is now available. It is through our users’ support that we have now been able to expand to five regions globally. London is experiencing a boom in tech and entrepreneurship that looks very similar to NYC’s own tech expansion a few years ago, and we want to provide innovative companies in the United Kingdom with the infrastructure they need to grow and succeed. Additionally, we want to ensure that UK developers can comply with data privacy regulations by having a native facility, this way they can do an online background check in more efficient way. IPv6 and private networking are available for Droplets deployed in the new London region. We are excited to see what is developed in the London datacenter and look forward to offering more DigitalOcean regions around the world as we continue to grow. No more waiting. Spin up a Droplet in LON1!

This is a guide on setting up an IPSEC/L2TP vpn server with Ubuntu 14.04 using Openswan as the IPsec server, xl2tpd as the l2tp provider and ppp or local users / PAM for authentication. It has a detailed explanation with every step. We choose the IPSEC/L2TP protocol stack because of recent vulnerabilities found in pptpd VPNs and because it is supported on all major operating systems by default. Why a VPN? More than ever, your freedom and privacy when online is under threat. Governments and ISPs want to control what you can and can't see while keeping a record of everything you do, and even the shady-looking guy lurking around your coffee shop or the airport gate can grab your bank details easier than you may think. A self hosted VPN lets you surf the web the way it was intended: anonymously and without oversight. A VPN (virtual private network) creates a secure, encrypted tunnel through which all of your online data passes back and forth. Any application that requires an internet connection works with this self hosted VPN, including your web browser, email client, and instant messaging program, keeping everything you do online hidden from prying eyes while masking your physical location and giving you unfettered access to any website or web service no matter where you happen to be at the moment. This tutorial is available for the following platforms: Raspberry Pi with Arch Linux ARM CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Ubuntu 13.10 Ubuntu 13.04 Ubuntu 12.10 Ubuntu 12.04…

If you’ve accidentally screwed your /etc/fstab file and rebooted, you might run into some issues while trying to make changes to fix it, i.e. Error writing fstab:Read-only file system   Fixing Error writing fstab: Read-only file system In order to fix this issue, you will need to remount the affected mount-point with read / write options. This can be done by issuing the mount command: mount -o remount,rw /   Where / indicates your root mount point, change accordingly.

CentOS 6.5 [1] Change hostname with a commnad (but if rebooting, it will be back). [[email protected] ~]# hostname # show current hostname srv1.vpsmate.net [[email protected] ~]# hostname srv2.vpsmate.net # change hostname [[email protected] ~]# hostname srv2.vpsmate.net [2] Change hostname permanently. [[email protected] ~]# vi /etc/sysconfig/network # change HOSTNAME=srv2.vpsmate.net [[email protected] ~]# exit CentOS release 6.5 Kernel xxx srv2.vpsmate.net login: # changed   CentOS 7 [1]Change hostname with a commnad (but if rebooting, it will be back). [[email protected] ~]# hostname # show current hostname srv1.vpsmate.net [[email protected] ~]# hostname srv2.vpsmate.net # change hostname [[email protected] ~]# hostname srv2.vpsmate.net [2] Change hostname permanently. [[email protected] ~]# vi /etc/hostname # change srv1.vpsmate.net [[email protected] ~]# exit CentOS Linux 7 Kernel 3.10.0-123.4.2.el7.x86_64 on an x86_64 srv1 login: # just changed      

I am going to do a couple of blogposts with “basic” workflows using the Web Client. Let me know if you find this useful or not… I will start with deploying the vCenter Server appliance and will assume you all know how to install ESXi. I prefer using the vCenter Server appliance in my lab as I can deploy it in minutes without the need to pre-install an OS etc. The following steps outline the import process of the vCenter Server appliance. Open the vSphere Client Click “File – Deploy OVF Template” Browse for the OVA file Provide a name for the to be imported virtual machine, in our case “vCenter-01” Select a datastore where this virtual machine should be stored Use the default Disk Format Provide the networking details like IP address, DNS, netmask etc. Finish the wizard During the reinstallation of my lab environment I ran in to this issue a couple of times. In my environment when I deploy the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (VCVA) I always got the following error on the remote console: No Networking Detected This seems to happen when I point my vSphere Client directly to a host and import the OVA. When you point your vSphere Client directly at a host you do not have the option to fill out the networking details in the OVF wizard. (At least I don’t…) When I point my vSphere Client to a vCenter Server and import the OVA I get the option to fill out the networking details. Log In to the VMware vCenter Server…

Windows Server 2012 introduces a plethora of new features with a key emphasis on Cloud integration being the buzz word in the industry over the last 24 months.  Windows continues to grow and mature as an operating system with the latest iteration being more secure, reliable and robust and more importantly making it easily interoperable with other systems. This post will focus on Installing a Windows 2012 Server and then promoting it as the first domain controller in a new Forest.  Even though the logical steps haven’t really changed dramatically since the introduction of Windows 2008, the interface has! especially with the new metro look.  So let’s begin our journey with Windows Server 2012 as this will be the first of many articles on configuring different components that Windows Server 2012 has to offer. Installing Windows Server 2012 The first step is to boot up from the CD or ISO image and select your language settings. Select your Language and input options and then click on Next. Click Install Now Select the operating system you want to install.  I have selected Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate Server with a GUI.  The other option is server core which was first introduced in Windows 2008 and is a minimal install with no GUI but provides remote management through Windows PowerShell and other tools. Click Next Accept the License terms Click Next We are performing a new installation of Windows Server, so click on Custom. Partition your drives and then click Next. The Installation of Windows then proceeds. The installation will eventually re-start…

Unable to initialize a second virtual disk within Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2 (2000767) Symptoms After adding virtual disk on Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2, you cannot make disk online Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine is configured with Virtual Hardware version 7 You see this error within Windows under Disk Management:The disk is offline because of policy set by an administrator Resolution To resolve this issue: Open a command prompt from within the virtual machine. To run the Diskpart utility, run the command:diskpart.exe  To display the SAN policy, run the command:diskpart> sanSAN Policy: Offline Shared Change the SAN policy to be online with the command:diskpart> san policy=OnlineAllDiskpart successfully changed the SAN policy for the current operating system. To get a summary information about each disk, run the command:diskpart>list diskDisk Status Size Free Dyn Gpt --------------- ------------------ ----------- ---------- Disk 0 Online 40 GB 0 B *Disk 1 Offline 60 GB 1024 KB Select Disk 1 (currently offline disk) with the command:diskpart>select disk 1Disk 1 is now the selected disk Note: From this point, all diskpart commands apply to this disk. Clear the read-only attribute for the Disk 1 with the command:diskpart>attributes disk clear readonlydisk attributes cleared successfully To check that the read-only attribute has been cleared, run the command: diskpart>attributes disk current read-only state: no boot disk: no pagefile disk: no hibernation file disk: no crashdump disk: no clustered disk: no Bring Disk 1 online with the command:diskpart>online diskdiskpart successfully onlined the selected disk The disk should now be able to be assigned a drive letter and be mounted.

I got this offer from bootstrapped.fm, the promotion is only valid for new accounts. Register a new Linode account. Help a bro and use my referral code: 9299e500bf730cdceba153c4ecef196aac067e57 Use BOOTSTRAPPEDFM to get $50 credit. You will need to prepay $5 with your credit card. Enjoy your new linode account.

Introduction VPN, or virtual private network, is a secure method of connecting remote internet resources together as if they were under the same LAN. OpenVPN is a popular implementation that works on Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems and can be utilized to create complex, encrypted networks between physically dispersed servers which you can change your screens from Orlando mobile led screen hire for a clearer use of your PC. The OpenVPN Access Server is a solution built on top of traditional OpenVPN that is used as a complete portal for managing connections, users, and interfaces. It provides the underlying VPN instance, a web interface for managing the suite, and a client that can be used within a web browser. In this guide, we'll install and configure the OpenVPN Access Server on a CentOS 6.5 VPS instance. Download and Install Packages We can obtain the OpenVPN Access Server package for CentOS from the project's website. Right click on the package that matches your version of CentOS and your machine's architecture. Select the "copy link address" item or whatever option is closest. On your CentOS droplet, download the package with curl -O (that's the letter "o" not a zero) followed by the URL you copied from the page. In my case, this turned out to be: cd ~ curl -O http://swupdate.openvpn.org/as/openvpn-as-2.0.5-CentOS6.x86_64.rpm When the package has been downloaded, you can install it with using the rpmcommand: sudo rpm -i openvpn-as-2.0.5-CentOS6.x86_64.rpm After installing the package, an administration account is created called openvpn. However, no password has been set. Set a password for the administrator's account by typing: sudo…

About Fail2Ban Servers do not exist in isolation, and those servers with only the most basic SSH configuration can be vulnerable to brute force attacks. fail2ban provides a way to automatically protect the server from malicious signs. The program works by scanning through log files and reacting to offending actions such as repeated failed login attempts. Step One—Install Fail2Ban Because fail2ban is not available from CentOS, we should start by downloading the EPEL repository: rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm Follow up by installing fail2ban: yum install fail2ban   Step Two—Copy the Configuration File The default fail2ban configuration file is location at /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf. The configuration work should not be done in that file, however, and we should instead make a local copy of it. cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local   After the file is copied, you can make all of your changes within the new jail.local file. Many of possible services that may need protection are in the file already. Each is located in its own section, configured and turned off. Step Three—Configure defaults in Jail.Local Open up the the new fail2ban configuration file: vi /etc/fail2ban/jail.local   The first section of defaults covers the basic rules that fail2ban will follow. If you want to set up more nuanced protection for your virtual private server, you can customize the details in each section. You can see the default section below. [DEFAULT] # "ignoreip" can be an IP address, a CIDR mask or a DNS host. Fail2ban will not # ban a host which matches an address in this list. Several addresses can be # defined using…

Introduction When deciding which server architecture to use for your environment, there are many factors to consider, such as performance, scalability, availability, reliability, cost, and ease of management. Here is a list of commonly used server setups, with a short description of each, including pros and cons. Keep in mind that all of the concepts covered here can be used in various combinations with one another, and that every environment has different requirements, so there is no single, correct configuration. 1. Everything On One Server The entire environment resides on a single server. For a typical web application, that would include the web server, application server, and database server. A common variation of this setup is a LAMP stack, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, on a single server. Use Case: Good for setting up an application quickly, as it is the simplest setup possible, but it offers little in the way of scalability and component isolation. Pros: Simple Cons: Application and database contend for the same server resources (CPU, Memory, I/O, etc.) which, aside from possible poor performance, can make it difficult to determine the source (application or database) of poor performance Not readily horizontally scalable Related Tutorials: How To Install LAMP On Ubuntu 14.04 2. Separate Database Server The database management system (DBMS) can be separated from the rest of the environment to eliminate the resource contention between the application and the database, and to increase security by removing the database from the DMZ, or public internet. Use Case: Good for setting up an application quickly,…

This howto guide shows you’ll how to enable EPEL repository under RHEL/CentOS 6/5 to install additional standard open source packages by using YUM command. What is EPEL EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is open source and free community based repository project from Fedora team which provides 100% high quality add-on software packages for Linux distribution including RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), CentOS, and Scientific Linux. Epel project is not a part of RHEL/Cent OS but it is designed for major Linux distributions by providing lots of open source packages like networking, sys admin, programming, monitoring and so on. Most of the epel packages are maintained by Fedora repo. Why we use EPEL repository? Provides lots of open source packages to install via Yum. Epel repo is 100% open source and free to use. It does not provide any core duplicate packages and no compatibility issues. All epel packages are maintained by Fedora repo. How To Enable EPEL Repository in RHEL/CentOS 6/5? First, you need to download the file using Wget and then install it using RPM on your system to enable the EPEL repository. Use below links based on your Linux OS versions. (Make sure you must be root user). RHEL/CentOS 6 32-64 Bit ## RHEL/CentOS 6 32-Bit ## # wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm ## RHEL/CentOS 6 64-Bit ## # wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm   RHEL/CentOS 5 32-64 Bit ## RHEL/CentOS 5 32-Bit ## # wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm ## RHEL/CentOS 5 64-Bit ## # wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm   RHEL/CentOS 4 32-64 Bit ## RHEL/CentOS 4 32-Bit…

60% OFF with code LEC60KSSD1G CPU: 2 Core RAM: 512MB Hard Disk: 15GB on SSD disks IP addresses: 1 IPv4, /64 IPv6 Dedicated internet bandwidth: 2000 GB OS: Linux Control Panel: SolusVM Virtualization: KVM Type: Unmanaged Order here

XenPower L BARGAIN! 40%OFF, €28.8/year 200GB DISK! Use the coupon code XPLBARGAIN on the annual billing cycle to get 40% OFF for life LIMITED SLOTS AVAILABLE.!!!!   CPU: 1 Core RAM: 1GB Hard Disk: 200GB RAID 6 disks IP addresses: 1 IPv4, Dedicated internet bandwidth: 2000 GB OS: Linux Control Panel: SolusVM Virtualization: XEN Type: Unmanaged More info here    

Oktay is back once again, this time with some offers for his brands VPSDime andWinity.io. Recently, VPSDime expanded to introduce some high-storage offers which give you storage at Backupsy pricing but with more RAM. Winity.io has expanded to Los Angeles since we last featured them. Oktay and his brands are known for the custom control panel they all utilize, always fully integrated into the billing area. No double logins and no SolusVM to have to fool around with. VPSDime nodes have a variety of configurations but they each have 384GB of RAM, at least 8 drives in RAID10, and either dual Intel Xeon E5 2620 or dual Intel Xeon X5660/L5640 CPUs. SSD caching is available in Dallas only. Disk space in Los Angeles is full SSD. The storage nodes for VPSDime are configured with dual Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, 128GB RAM, and 12x 4TB hard drives. VPSDime offers come with a free MySQL offloaded account in Dallas, where you’ll get 20GB of space, and free daily backups with an option to self-restore. Winity uses host nodes with redundant power and network, dual Intel Xeon E5 2660v2 CPUs, 384GB RAM, 8x 4TB hard drives in RAID 10 for strage, and 4x 128GB SSDs for caching. A full, legal, non-trial Windows license is included in the price. Reviews are predominantly positive. As always, please share your experiences with them in the comments! VPSDime High Memory   6GB RAM 30GB disk space 4 vCPU cores 2TB bandwidth 1Gbps uplink 1x IPv4 address IPv6 in Dallas/LA OpenVZ/Custom Panel Dallas, New Jersey Los Angeles $7/month Order here VPSDime High…

Introduction This article will walk through the steps required to install HHVM on Ubuntu 13.10 on a Digital Ocean VPS. The article will also illustrate how HHVM can be used by creating: A command line 'Hello World' script in PHP A web based 'Hello World' script written in PHP and served by the HHVM server Prerequisites The only prerequisite for this tutorial is a VPS with Ubuntu 13.10 x64 installed. Note that HHVM doesn't support any 32 bit operating system and they have no plans to add support for 32 bit operating systems. You will need to execute commands from the command line which you can do in one of two ways: Use SSH to access the droplet. Use the 'Console Access' from the Digital Ocean Droplet Management Panel What is HHVM? HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is a virtual machine developed and open sourced by Facebook to process and execute programs and scripts written in PHP. Facebook developed HHVM because the regular Zend+Apache combination isn't as efficient to serve large applications built in PHP. According to their website, HHVM has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the Zend PHP engine + APC (which is the current way of hosting a large majority of PHP applications). Installing HHVM Installing HHVM is quite straightforward and shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Executing the following 4 commands from the command line will have HHVM installed and ready: wget -O - http://dl.hhvm.com/conf/hhvm.gpg.key | apt-key add - echo deb http://dl.hhvm.com/ubuntu saucy main | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hhvm.list apt-get update apt-get…

About Linux Swapping Linux RAM is composed of chunks of memory called pages. To free up pages of RAM, a “linux swap” can occur and a page of memory is copied from the RAM to preconfigured space on the hard disk. Linux swaps allow a system to harness more memory than was originally physically available. However, swapping does have disadvantages. Because hard disks have a much slower memory than RAM, virtual private server performance may slow down considerably. Additionally, swap thrashing can begin to take place if the system gets swamped from too many files being swapped in and out. Check for Swap Space Before we proceed to set up a swap file, we need to check if any swap files have been enabled on the VPS by looking at the summary of swap usage. sudo swapon -s   An empty list will confirm that you have no swap files enabled: Filename Type Size Used Priority Check the File System After we know that we do not have a swap file enabled on the virtual server, we can check how much space we have on the server with the df command. The swap file will take 256MB— since we are only using up about 8% of the /dev/sda, we can proceed. df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda 20907056 1437188 18421292 8% / udev 121588 4 121584 1% /dev tmpfs 49752 208 49544 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 124372 0 124372 0% /run/shm Create and Enable the Swap File Now it’s time to create the swap file…