Another option is logmein.com. If your primarily worried about windows boxes, you can install the log me in agent and then remote in from the website.

No firewall holes. No VPN. It's a simple management console and works very well. So so sure it if works for linux yet.

I use it and it works well for my windows box... then I ssh or vnc to my linux box.

*I don't work for them... it's just a nice tool.

Leep wrote:

No matter what I click on, I can only see the first paragraph of news articles. I'm logged in, and I cant figure out how to read the article...

I had that same problem... Then I realised that they are linking to other sites.

Click the "Article Source" link under the date. That takes you to the full article!

If you don't mind... throw up a post and let us know what you decided on! It's always neat to see how projects turn out.

YES!

Using the free vm options available to you, you can easily create those machines. I'm running five (two apache, one mysql, one file and backup, one dns/dhcp/monitoring) in VMServer.

The key... RAM allocation is important. I've got 4GB of ram on that, and I've allocated 1.5GB to mysql, and 512 to each of the other VMs. I get decent performance. YMMV

You can get a great box (dual core) with 4GB RAM for cheap now-a-days. You shouldn't need much more than that if you aren't pushing the virtual boxes that much.

pm wrote:

take a look on openfiler. (openfiler.com)

Openfiler is great to present storage. But, if you're looking for something to present iSCSI LUNS to ESX, XEN, or even a CIFS file share for a business, it should be backed by a good hardware RAID card.

Openfiler can stripe across block level disks, but it's still a software RAID.

3ware products have always seemed to have great Linux support. They also support a command line interface (great for perl or bash processing).

Additionally, I believe the driver will log errors (drive failures and such) to syslog or /var/log/messages. With a file watcher, or splunk, you can easily trap the error and notify.