Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS= Davrom Consulting Newsletter - Issue # 50 - Dated: 20 Feb 2012 From the desk of David Clark Only seems like yesterday I released the last newsletter and we are already towards the later part of February 2012. Is it just me or is time speeding up? This newsletter I have touched on using CentOS Linux as an alternative to Fedora or Red Hat Linux and we have been installing CentOS servers for some time now. As always it is great to find good little products out there that help enhance an existing server setup so I have talked about our implementation of ownCloud. I also came across phpBB which I will test before writing an article on this - phpBB is an open source free bulletin board system for Linux. Support has been everything you can think of including dealing with some ISP changes to the way they handle bulk e-mail sends from customers...grrr... I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote Linux vs Mac - same underlying technology, one has a better price. CentOS For some time now you have seen me write and publish material on Fedora Linux which is based on the Red Hat Linux releases. Over the past few years I have also worked with CentOS which by comparison is based purely on the official Red Hat Linux releases but is the free licence of their product, as is Fedora. My favourite quip in comparing Fedora to CentOS from a screen view perspective is that if you take the logos out of the equation, they are identical - which is correct being based on the core Red Hat. So why would you use CentOS instead of Fedora? CentOS adheres to the staged releases of the official Red Hat releases themselves and therefore seldom change in any major part of the operating system packages. Fedora on the other hand release updates quite often although still based on Red Hat. Once you install Fedora it has a shorter supported life cycle for that specific version (currently at Fedora 16 at the time of writing this article) as compared to CentOS which is currently at version 6 (6.2 to be exact). At Davrom I run a Fedora 15 desktop (maybe going to 16 at some point) but our e-mail/web server is running CentOS 6 and we have another internal application server running CentOS 5.6. The two CentOS boxes, once set up, do not need to change and here is the key - if you need a Linux that is continually developed to suit the latest sound card, video card, network adapter etc, then Fedora is more suited as there will be someone out there hacking away at driver code to get it to run under Fedora, whereas CentOS, is less likely to have the latest driver to suit a very latest piece of hardware. To me this is the key difference. So at Davrom I favour using CentOS for servers and Fedora for desktops. Now before people from either Linux version start throwing sharp objects at me, both versions do well as desktops and servers - the key for me is in the overall role and need to change any major components that defines their ultimate role. Both being based on Red Hat and an excellent free open source alternative to the commercial versions. ownCloud Those who have spoken to me regarding cloud based solutions know that I am against storing company data on anything other than an internal, fully within your control, server. To date I am not convinced that if you store your private/confidential information on someone else's server that it remains actually yours - who really owns the information? While I appreciate the concept of sharing files and information in a wider forum via web interface I recently stumbled across an article in Linux-Magazine on ownCloud. ownCloud is in its early days but I have already implemented it as a solution for a committee I serve on for members to upload, download and share files and other information. I was amazed at how quickly it installs and administration is very simple. I am now going to possibly implement ownCloud for a family genealogy setup I already have in place as a method to further share information on-line between family members. For my initial purposes, we are using the one single web login to share everything however ownCloud is designed to use a user/group sharing capability. By default ownCloud presents you with Files, Contacts, Calendar, Music and Gallery categories. These can be disabled through the Apps manager but also support a couple of other plugins such as a Bookmarks manager. For calendaring it has an interface for the WebDAV/CalDAV technology so essentially uses the backend features that already exist in the Apache web server. This small footprint but feature filled "ready to go" solution has now become one of our other supported product offerings to our customers. I will now need to control myself and not install it everywhere :-) Link for ownCloud: http://owncloud.org From the Trenches Some comic or not so comic relief from the support days gone by. Just turn it off and back on again A company that was still using faxing technology had an issue with the modem not sending the faxes one day - the fax solution hanging off a UNIX system. When the customer phoned me I asked them to just turn off the modem and then turn it back on again. They laughed and told me that was the same support response used in the TV series the I.T Crowd. What made the customer laugh all the more that following my suggestion, faxing started working again. Tech Tip Recent bulk e-mail sending issues with some ISPs prompts me to cover this. Most ISPs monitor the amount of e-mail traffic coming from the links they provide to the Internet and what you may find, unless your ISP provides a bulk e-mail server to send through, your e-mails will be canceled from sending if you send a large amounts of e-mail in one hit, such as an invoice or statement run. Spammers use access points to quickly send hundreds or thousands of e-mail all at once and most ISPs are set to look for this pattern and mark it as spamming. In such instances innocent business e-mail can also be treated this way and results in frustration for the sender and the customers/contacts they are sending to. As a recommendation to get around this, I recommend customers approach their application support houses and ask if they can have the e-mails sent with a 20-30 second time delay between each one. While this is slower it gets around triggering the ISP anti-spam mechanism. On your Linux e-mail server you can then monitor your e-mail sending with commands like: mailq -v or mailq -v | more Back to Newsletters 
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