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• Entry #1: Setting It Up
  Topic: RAID1 with LVM on Ubuntu Server
  

  Mon, 02 Jan 2012:

  I had 2x750GB HDD's which I wanted to setup in a RAID array in my ubuntu server 10.04 LTS box.

  It turned out to be quite easy when following the guide provided by canonical:

  https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/advanced-installation.html

  
  But, I made a few adjustments. The guide makes you partition each of your physical disks into two sections, swap and root. both those are set to be used as 'physical drives for RAID'

  
  These would lead to the creation of two MD's (or md or 'multiple device'). I found it to be simpler to just have one partition for each HDD and use it as the physical drive for RAID. This would reult in only having one MD/md/multiple device.

  
  The reason I chose this was to make for simple maintanaince down the road. From the guide, to replace (remove and add) an HDD i would have to run the command:

  sudo mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/sda1

  sudo mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sda1

  If I have two md's, I would probably have to do:

  sudo mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
  sudo mdadm --remove /dev/md1 /dev/sda1
  

  replacing, sda1 with sdb1 if I want to change the second HDD

  So,  Since I want to setup an LVM, I will put the full HDD into RAID then setup that RAID Partition to be used as a 'physical drive for LVM'

  I think setup the LVM by creating one volume group and various logical volumes within that. I will choose ext4 and mount appropriately for the drives and setup one as a swap.

   

  
  

• Entry #1: First Things First: Bridging or Routing?
  Topic: OpenVPN on Ubuntu Server Behind Firewall
  

  Sun, 01 Jan 2012:

  When you are using an internal server to manage your intranet and LAN resources, some of the services running on on your internal server will run web-based gui's.

  Sure you can access those if you open up your intranet to the world wide web but that would defeat the whole purpose of your intranet. I host company resources over our intraweb, so it would be a bad thing to open them up to the world.

  Right now I setup FOG to ghost and manage PC images in a small LAN. It works great when I access the web-interface while connected to our local network, but I wouldn't be able to access this remotely.

  So, I'm seting up a VPN so that I can remotely connect to the intranet resources and web-gui's. I am planing on using OpenVPN.

  
  My internal server runs Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS and sits behind a router (firewalled router). So before setting up the VPN, I have to choose between a Routed or Bridged network.

  My understanding of those two concepts are as follows:

  >> Adding the Bridging configurations to my Ubuntu Server, would make my server act as a ethernet switch. When the client connects, it will recieve an IP which on the main subnet.

  >> A routing configuration would create a new subnet between the Ubuntu Server and the remote client. Then, the client and server could share resources together, but not with the rest of the network.

  
  I'm not too sure yet how this would affect internet traffic. I think the traffic in a bridged configuration would go through the intranet's router. The routed configuration may not, please comment if you know.

  Having said that, In general, the bridged network is a little more powerfull, but harder to setup and for my purposes I might be able to ge away with just a routed configuration, since All my services and resources are run on the Ubunut Server.

  
  I may just end up going for the bridged setup anyways since its 'better'.

  
  

• Entry #2: Ghosting Solution for Linux Server and Windows Clients
  Topic: Network With Windows Clients And Linux Admin
  

  Wed, 21 Dec 2011:

  Came across FOG today, this is going to be essential for managing the windows client PC images and their software updates. A blurb from their website:

  FOG is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP, Vista and 7 that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. FOG doesn't use any boot disks, or CDs; everything is done via TFTP and PXE. Also with fog many drivers are built into the kernel, so you don't really need to worry about drivers (unless there isn't a linux kernel driver for it). FOG also supports putting an image that came from a computer with a 80GB partition onto a machine with a 40GB hard drive as long as the data is less than 40GB.

   

  
  

• Entry #2: My Choice for Diagrams
  Topic: Diagram Tools
  

  Fri, 16 Dec 2011:

  looks like Graphviz is my choice for diagrams.

  But, It doesn't create sequence charts how I would like. Now to find something that does, and does it efficiently.

  Take a look here for my expiences with graphviz.

  
  

• Entry #1: The Plan
  Topic: Graphviz
  

  Fri, 16 Dec 2011:

  I'm a visual thinker, and I feel that i best describe my ideas through hand drawn images. So, for making diagrams and flowcharts, it looks like Graphviz is going to be my choice. I'm choosing it mainly because I can use it tomake diagrams in the command line.

  Thinking back to when I was in school, I remember spending so much time drawing up a flowchart using the (abominous) flowchart drawing tools provided in MS Word. It took forever.

  But now, Graphviz uses very simple text to generate the diagram. This will be faster to draw and even faster to edit in the future. For example, something as simpdle as

  digraph G {
    a -> b;
    a -> c;
    b -> d;
    b -> e;
    c -> f;
    c -> g;
    c -> h;
    g -> i;
    g -> j;
  }

  will generate all the neccesary arrows. But don't be fooled, there are a lot more capabilities.

  The documentation of Graphviz is quite technical, and not that easy for the newcomer to decypher. But, I'm sure i'll get the hang of it as I start using it more.

  I think there user base would expand if they included a "getting started" section on their homepage. I tried installing the .deb file on my ubuntu machine, but their were some unmet dependancies (+1 for apt package manager). luckily, it was a breeze installing the core tools using the ubuntu gui package manager.

  I will be following the command line instructions to use graphviz via the command line.

  
  

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