Speeding up the internet with pdnsd and squid

Living, as I do, in rural France, I suffer from rather slow internet connectivity.

My normal line speed is only 512Kbs and sometimes I struggle to achieve even this.

My solution is to use an Internet Acceleration Appliance, the building and configuration of which is detailed at….

www.InternetAccelerationAppliance.com

Now, whilst that works very well, the server that it runs on needs an upgrade (I’m going to add some more memory and another couple of SCSI disks) and will then be used for a number crunching/data processing project that I am about to embark on.

Now, I was resigned to losing the speed increase that the server gave me but today, over a cup of coffee in a little bar in the nearest village, I wondered to myself whether I could just install the functionality of the server onto my local PC.

I couldn’t see any reason why not and, less than an hour later, it was done.

Read more about… Speeding up the internet with pdnsd and squid

A cautionary tale….

Earlier this week I was busy rebuilding an old machine to use as a dedicated writing machine.

I going to blog all about that at TheFridayBlog (my writing blog) tomorrow!

One thing that I won’t mention there is the minor setback that occurred due to my stupidity and lack of thought.

The problem was rsync!

I decided (quite rightly) that it would be rather sensible to back up the writing machine not only to gmail (my normal process) and to an external USB drive (I just happened to have a spare one available) but also to my server.

Read more about… A cautionary tale….

10 reasons to love Puppy Linux

Following on from last week’s look at Puppy Linux, I thought that I’d go into a little more depth about this undeservedly underused operating system.

I’m grateful for all the comments on last week’s post (it seems that many other people are also passionate about Puppy Linux) and I am going to take them into account within this post.

I should start off by saying that I posted the wrong link last week…..

My link was to Puppy 5.0; there is a newer (and better) version (5.01) available at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1/lupu-501.iso (thanks; Joe Plaziak for that heads up!)

ICPUG suggested that I should be showing a link to….

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1 as this would show the distribution directory and allow you to download the MD5 file to be able to check the download.  As he said… “Nothing worse than having users say Puppy doesn’t work but in reality they got a bad download or burnt the CD incorrectly!”

Quite right too!

Read more about… 10 reasons to love Puppy Linux

And they call it Puppy Love…

In the beginning.  Part 1…

A couple of years ago, I was looking for an operating system for Chatwin and, after trying many others, came across Puppy Linux.

At first I thought that it was a joke, but then I investigated and found that that it wasn’t – far from it.

I’ll try to explain. Chatwin is a secondhand HP e-Vectra with a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM. She cost me all of 70 euros.

Nowadays, I wouldn’t be able to buy a machine with such a low spec but, if one did turn up in a yard sale, car boot sale or vide greniers (what we call a yard sale in France), I’d probably fork out 20 euros for one; 30 max!

In other words, she’s not a powerhouse. I bought her just so that I’d have another machine to do my writing on – a machine that didn’t have email and internet on, so I wouldn’t be distracted.

Read more about… And they call it Puppy Love…

A Server With X Appeal!

When building a server, my preference is to install Debian Stable and leave it at that.

However, for contingency’s sake, it is sometimes nice to have a graphical environment; I’ll explain why later on.

The following article is to detail how I build the base server using Debian Linux.

I don’t intend it to be a comprehensive quide to installing a Linux server – it’s just an explanation of how I choose to do it.

If you feel that I’m doing something wrong (or missing out something that might help me), please free to let me know.

Hardware

I have tested the installation of Debian on a number of machines ranging from a 600Mhz Celeron with 256Mb of Ram and a 9Gb IDE hard drive upto a 2.8Ghz Xeon with 2Gb of Ram and a 72Gb SCSI hard drive.

The only vital component of the installation machine is that it has a working network card/interface and a CD Drive. You will need a keyboard and screen for the installation process but, once the machine is up and running, these are not required.

Read more about… A Server With X Appeal!

Lightweight Debian Linux

Although I use Mint (an Ubuntu derivative) for my main machine, for some purposes I like to roll my own distribution.

Generally I install the bare minimum (see A Server with X Appeal) and then install the Gnome Desktop on top of that.

Once debian is installed Gnome is installed as follows….

Read more about… Lightweight Debian Linux