As many of you already discovered there's no official Linux client for accessing VMWare Server 2.x, the only thing VMWare suggests you to do is to use internal web interface based on a Tomcat webserver.
This web interface is ugly and slow, not so reliable if you plan a clean and fast administration, as alternative you can use the good and efficient Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC).

Again: VIC is only available for Windows platform and no Linux (or OS-X) client is available now, you can run it on top of WINE libs but it's still not a linux native client.
VMWare promised a lot of time ago a "planned version" for Linux but nobody have already seen it (planned with no expected date...) so we're still waiting for it.

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I've spent a lot of time doing something else and I left the blog alone for a while.

This new entry is related to VMWare Server v2.0 and Virtual Infrastructure Client on Linux.
Many of you already know there's no Virtual Infrastructure Client available on a linux client, so it's quite a mess if you'd like to control a VMWare server if you don't want the ugly web interface available with it.

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This relates to Fedora 10 and ISPConfig 3.0.1 set up as described in this HowtoForge post One of my colleagues recently got interested in offering our clients Wordpress as a content management system, so he's been trying it out. Yesterday he found out that if he wanted to change the permalink style in Wordpress he needed write access to .htaccess, which he didn't have because the user rights haven't been set up very well there. So I gave him write access by using

chown apache:apache .htaccess

Unfortunately this resulted in a 500 Interal Server Error. Looking at the error log for the website I tried this for it let me know that RewriteEngine directives were not allowed in the .htaccess. Since I didn't want to mess with the base configurations of ISPConfig I started looking around for other options. Eventually I found that I had to add something similar to this to the Apache directives field under options under the website's settings

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  <Directory /var/www/[sitename]/web/>
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
  </Directory>
</IfModule>

Of course [sitename] should be replaced with the name of your website. It all works after I restarted the apache server myself, but I do not know if that is completely necessary. Also it might take a few seconds before ISPConfig finishes editing the configuration file.

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So, you've followed my previous blog: Replacing faulted drive on Linux software RAID (MDTOOLS), you already know how to swap a faulty drive with a new one, but what happens if you need to substitute primary disk where your Computer makes boot ?

After adding a new disk to your raid chain it's a good idea to make it bootable as well by installing grub on MBR. When boot drive in your raid array becomes faulty all you've to do is to power off your machine, substitute your faulty drive and boot your computer again. If you've properly set bios boot sequence to iterate between primary, secondary, ... you can boot your raid array again, second or third HD makes the boot because you've installed grub on it, pretty easy and straightforward, this contributes to have a bulletproof system.

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A report on the state of security has been released today by the Sans Internet Storm Center , the two main threats posed to an organisation are the threat of targetted "spear phishing" against Client Desktops and attacks against web applications.

Most here at Linux.com would be familiar with the threat of the malware against Windows Desktops, this report highlights the fact that other client applications are being targeted; Adobe Reader and Quicktime are good examples. Of course running Linux on your desktop lowers the risk of these attack vectors considerably.

Another area where Linux based open source solutions excel is in security vulnerability assessment tools. Use of these tools will help to find security vulnerabilities within your web server and web applications. Once the vulnerabilities are found they can be fixed or remediated.

Here are some tools to get you started:

Nmap for port scanning of your system(s). Shows you open ports on your server and holes in your firewall.
OpenVas for server vulnerability scanning of your servers. It checks for listening ports / services and then tries to confirm if services are vulnerable to exploitation using a db of thousands of vulnerabilities.
Nikto is web service scanner that does a thorough analysis of your web server. Looks for scripts and server misconfigurations that are a security threat.
SQLiX performs SQL Injection Testing that can find vulnerable web application applications. This is a popular attack vector for web application attacks.
OSSEC  is a Host based intrusion detection system that is easy to setup and use.

These tools are all high quality and just a sample of the powerful open source security tools that are available.

About the Author: Peter runs the popular online open source security tool scanning site http://www.hackertarget.com. Where various security scanning tools are made available for free to assist in the securing of internet based servers.

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Here's a very quick HOWTO for Linux Software RAID, these notes are maded for replacing a faulty disk with a new one.

When you've a software RAID configuration with linux you've planned to survive to hardware failures, when these failures happen you need to replace the faulty drive with a new one and inform your RAID configuration of it.

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