Installing PowerDNS (With MySQL Backend) And Poweradmin On Debian Etch

This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on a Debian Etch system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver - in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.

A quick solution to a common problem: your MySQL server has thousands of connections, some or most are not persistent. Unless you say otherwise, MySQL will check connections hostnames against the system DNS server. While this is generally not a problem with low traffic, when you are dealing with many concurrent connections you are not only wasting cycles with DNS name resolve, you may also overwhelm or alert your DNS server/provider. The solution? Set skip-name-resolve in the my.cnf file and MySQL will run the connections off of their IP address instead of the DNS name that it resolves to.  

Every so often we have a client worrying about unauthenticated users. For example, as part of the output of SHOW PROCESSLIST they will see:

+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id  | User                 | Host               | db   | Command | Time | State | Info             |
+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| 235 | unauthenticated user | 10.10.2.74:53216   | NULL | Connect | NULL | login | NULL             |
| 236 | unauthenticated user | 10.120.61.10:51721 | NULL | Connect | NULL | login | NULL             |
| 237 | user                 | localhost          | NULL | Query   | 0    | NULL  | show processlist |
+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+

Who are these unauthenticated users, how do they get there, and why aren’t they …

Virtual Hosting Howto With Virtualmin On CentOS 5.1

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.x server to offer all services needed by virtual web hosters. These include web hosting, smtp server with (SMTP-AUTH and TLS, SPF, DKIM, Domainkeys), DNS, FTP, MySQL, POP3/IMAP, Firewall, Webalizer for stats.

Virtual Hosting Howto With Virtualmin On CentOS 5.1

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.x server to offer all services needed by virtual web hosters. These include web hosting, smtp server with (SMTP-AUTH and TLS, SPF, DKIM, Domainkeys), DNS, FTP, MySQL, POP3/IMAP, Firewall, Webalizer for stats.

I am happy to announce the latest creation from foundeo: fusionKit.

fusionKit is a CD full of some handy ColdFusion components and UDF's. It is a similar concept to the DRK's that Macromedia used to sell, but is it's 100% ColdFusion.

My favorite component in the kit is the Bayesian CFC. You may recall that spam filters tend to use bayesian analysis to determine if a message is spam or ham. This CFC allows you to perform the same kind of analysis on any block of text. I am using this CFC in one of my client's blogs, and it has blocked over 4,000 spam comments in one week!

There is also the tagging CFC, which makes it easy to work with tags or …

Ooooh... a dns system that gets its info from a database. Now all I need is a DHCP daemon that will talk to the same database. Then my domain name system will be as cool as Active Directory :)

http://wiki.powerdns.com/projects/trac/

Ooooh... a dns system that gets its info from a database. Now all I need is a DHCP daemon that will talk to the same database. Then my domain name system will be as cool as Active Directory :)

http://wiki.powerdns.com/projects/trac/