For some nice graph with some data from the hosthuis servers I use cacti to make these. The only requirement I really had that it had to be using SNMP, and it gave the current number of mails coming in and out. I found one made by Ian P. Christian at his personal blog.
Category Archives: Debian
Things can be easy sometimes
Posted by Paul
on 30 January 2010
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remember that I wrote about that KVM wasn’t working a few days ago? Yesterday I finally discovered the problem. I forgot to enable hardware virtualisation in my bios. Sometimes, iam just not so smart 
mod ruid for apache
Posted by Paul
on 26 January 2010
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Another post about the setup of hostshuis.nl’s servers. This time not about the virtualisation iam using at the server, but about something complete else. A (pretty simple) apache module, but a very nice one (at least, thats my opinion 
). Read more »
Using KVM, its not always working
Posted by Paul
on 25 January 2010
2 comments
Using KVM for virtualisation, why?
Posted by Paul
on 24 January 2010
2 comments
A month ago I wrote already in my previous post that hosthuis.nl is using KVM for there servers. Now that we moved our first server as well to a new datacentre, we are currently installing KVM on that server as well. A lot people think KVM is something complete else as virtualisation, and actually they are both correct as wrong. They are thinking its a KVM Switch, what means you can control serveral server/PC s with 1 keyboard or mouse (Locally, or with a special device via internet). However, this KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, something complete else Read more »
Debian lenny released, time to upgrade
Posted by Paul
on 15 February 2009
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Debian lenny is official released yesterday (See for more information the debian site, http://www.debian.org/).
So I decided to upgrade one of the servers of hosthuis.nl, more exact, my dev server basicly. Its hosting mainly our nagios installation, second DNS, some downloads and my dev things. So not really important for most parts .
Ofcourse I started with backupping everything that was at the server already. Doing this i found out there there is like 50gig of junk at the server, that can be removed. So its not only a OS upgrade, its nearly a clean start . Maybe I just install the complete box again, but iam not sure for that. Depends on certian other things as well.
First we will need to upgrade apt en aptitude. This to be sure there will be no problems later on this traject. This can be done by running
aptitude install aptitude
After running this command both apt and aptitude are updated to lenny.
Now we first do a minimal upgrade by calling
aptitude upgrade
This will upgrade the packages that dont have any problem or something.
after this its time to do the real upgrade, and this can be done easyly by calling
aptitude dist-upgrade
After this is called the full upgrade is done, and we need to wait a bit
and lastly we can reboot the server and hope everything goes Ok 
After this reboot everything works luckily, and we are finished upgrading. I will only need to reinstall nagios3, as nagios2 was removed. This is hopefully not that difficult
Installing freedos
Posted by Paul
on 23 December 2008
No comments
The data from the BIOS update official requires DOS to work. Iam now going to try it with install freedos, and running it then.
Firstly to do this I needed to install syslinux from the debian repo. With this ramdisk I will be able to boot with freedos later.
After installing it, I copy some files to /boot/, where grub everything excepts:
cp -a /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/.
Now we download and extract freedos:
devbox:~# wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
--15:43:34-- http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
=> `FDOEM.144.gz'
Resolving www.fdos.org... 65.254.250.110
Connecting to www.fdos.org|65.254.250.110|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 109,795 (107K) [application/octet-stream]
100%[=====================================================================================================================================>] 109,795 128.41K/s
15:43:36 (128.13 KB/s) – `FDOEM.144.gz’ saved [109795/109795]
devbox:~# zcat FDOEM.144.gz > /boot/biosupd.fdd
and after that edit the menu.lst to include it.
Here we add this piece:
title BIOS update And now we are going to test this thing first
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd /boot/biosupd.fdd
The first time after rebooting I made a small mistake, what caused a grub error, but after fixing that it works
After doing this I mount the biodupd.fdd and copy the files from the bios update. Lets hope it works 
It doesn’t work :(
Posted by Paul
on 23 December 2008
No comments
Installing debian, the hard way
Posted by Paul
on 23 December 2008
2 comments
As said earlier this week, one of my plans is to test Xen the upcomming holiday.
As I need for this a new debian install thats the first thing to start with. As my current dev box is pretty old (Its somewhere from 2000, with only a 800 MHz CPU and 128MB RAM), its going to be fun.
Firstly, as I dont have any CD-r’s anymore, and the box dont want to start with a USB stick to boot, there is no OS on it, and I dont have another floppy disk as the one in that box I have a problem.
After trying some stuff around I found a BIOS update, that should support USB booting. I also found a HD that has still debian on it, so we have 2 things. Now only need to find a floppy, what I need to use for the BIOS update. That wasnt that difficult
Now I have those all I need to make a USB stick empty, and try to update it. More to follow soon?
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