When copying files over the network, the files informations can be modified.

When using cp, one can avoid this issue by using the -a which will do the copy in archive mode, meaning that it will keep the links, preserve mode, ownership and timestamps and the copy is recursive.

the solution to this over the network is rsync alongside with ssh.

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The Intel wireless card 4965 AGN does not work properly on ad-hoc networks since hardy and kernel 2.6.24 or around, network-manager can’t get it to use the mode ad-hoc and a standard configuration like:

$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid mode ad-hoc channel X key s:mykey13charss
$ sudo dhclient wlan0

will fail to get an ip except a long battle at dhclient’ing around.

I managed to get a process to get things working faster.

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This tutorial will show how-to connect to a Cisco VPN Concentrator using vpnc.

vpnc is a VPN client compatible with cisco3000 VPN Concentrator which runs in userspace and uses the tun kernel module.

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5. Preseed: Installation automation:

Like Red Hat’s kickstart file, Debian based distribution can use a preseed file. The preseed file will contain the different information that the installer will require in order to proceed with the installation.

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4. PXELinux

PXELinux is a boot loader similar to syslinux. As syslinux is used for booting from a CD, Pxelinux is designed for PXE booting.

To get PXE Boot Loader and anything required to set up a netboot install, you will need to get the archive netboot.tar.gz from ubuntu repositories.

Let’s go to our TFTP server root directory and get PXELinux set up.

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3. TFTP server

There is a couple of tftp server around there. The one chosen for this tutorial is tftpd-hpa does the job.tftpd package could not handle PXE protocol.

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For the purpose of this tutorial, I decided to choose dnsmasq to act as a DNS/DHCP server. The reason behind this is that dnsmasq is simple to configure and does a good job in providing DNS and DHCP services for a small LAN.

2. DHCP server:

The DHCP server is going to be involved twice in this scenario. First, when our client is going to boot on its network interface, the DHCP server is going to provide the client with an IP address to be able to communicate with other servers. Also, on this first contact, the DHCP server is going to supply our client with a filename and a server address where to get the bootloader using TFTP protocol.

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there is many ways of installing Linux. Nowadays, the most common one is probably by using a CD. Download the CD, stick it in your CDRom drive and let’s roll!!!

If you intent to deploy Ubuntu over several computers, this can easily become cumbersome.

This tutorial will explain how to install Ubuntu/Debian through the network using preseed files so you can turn on your computer, walk away and come back later with your fresh install up and running.

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SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol for managing networks. Each managed entity in the network will run an snmp server (snmpd) which is going to collect datas from the server such as networking, load, cpu …

Cacti on the other hand is a frontend to the RRDTool with SNMP support. It collects and keep data in a MySQL database and display them through a PHP web frontend.

This tutorial will show how to configure the network manager to use Cacti and how to set up snmp on the managed host.

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3. Adding new devices to cacti

A device can be anything which is SNMP enabled. It could be a router, a switch….

In our example, we are going to add the server we configured in the first part of this tutorial. The server is on localhost, but it could be anywhere on a network, as long as our manager host is allowed to connect to its SNMP port.

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