One of the most important responsibilities of any administrator is to make regular backups. But unlike backing up regular data, backing up databases isn't a straightforward affair. Designing an effective strategy for taking backups of production MySQL servers depends on a lot of factors.

Recently I fooled around with GlusterFS, a distributed file system especially intended for use as backend storage. The first impression is quite good – as long as you use it for the right task.

Mail administrators which use spamassassin and its Bayesian filter need to train the classifier on a regular basis. Spamassassin's sa-learn utility needs to process full RFC-822 emails including mail headers and the the mail body. The following howto describes a method of how full emails can be extracted from the mailsystem Zarafa.

With Kickstart, you can customize automatic installation of any Fedora-based distribution. And to make everything run as quickly as possible, you can store Kickstart files and Linux packages on a local Apache web server, which then servers as your network installation and update server, saving you bandwidth every time you roll out a new machine.

The 2013 lineup includes 15 Linux events worldwide and 13 co-located Linux training opportunities, illustrating global demand for technical Linux content, knowledge and collaboration.

Whoinix is based on Debian and uses Tor and VirtualBox to make one anonymous to the outside world. The OS is made of two virtual machines, one just runs Tor and acts as a gateway to the Internet, while the other uses a completely isolated network which you can use for your work.

At the end of February, .eduGuru set out to begin another round of research on a trend in higher ed web development and took a look at the CMSs being used from school to school. PHP and Java rule the roost as programming language, with PHP just barely leading.

If you've spent any time examining the network traffic to and from your web browser, you will notice the prolific number of trackers embedded in the pages. Blocking them at the firewall will stop every form of tracking from the sites blocked. In some cases it will even speed up loading and rendering.