Bootstrapping Vinum: A Foundation for Reliable Servers
by Robert A. Van Valzah

Any machine that is going to provide reliable service needs to have either redundant components on-line or a pool of off-line spares that can be promptly swapped in. Commodity PC hardware makes it affordable for even small organizations to have some spare parts available that could be pressed into service following the failure of production equipment. These instructions show how to build a pair of disk drives where either one is adequate to keep your server running if the other fails. Life is better if they are both working, but your server will never die unless both disk drives die at once. Read More

Growing FreeBSD filesystems
by Marc Fonvieille

Until today it was impossible to expand the size of a filesystem. FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE comes with a new utility: growfs(8). This program permits us to enlarge, in certains conditions, the size of an existing ufs filesystem. Read More

Configuring IPSec on OpenBSD 2.9
by Robert V. Sigillito

We began working with OpenBSD v2.9 to implement a VPN solution for little cost in order to spare a handful of users a 35 mile drive to another facility. Why drive out of your way, when you can use a public network to pass your data in a fully encrypted private tunnel? Being new to OpenBSD, but not Unix, we made more than our share of mistakes. This guide is an attempt to document how we successfully configured IPsec on OpenBSD v2.9. Read More

Logging Syslog to a Database
by Zbyszek Sobiecki

When there's a problem on your system, or in your network, the first thing you check are system logs. You identify which system you should check, then locate the logfile. Sometimes you even have to check your syslog configuration, only to discover that what you are looking for is not even logged, due to a misconfiguration. You may also run 'less', 'more' and 'grep', to start digging into it. It's nice when you find the answer to your problem in the last few lines of log, but what if you can't? Read More

IPv6 Trends
by Girish B Hampali

Girish B. Hampali gives us a quick little article on IPv6. It explains a few of the reasons why we need IPv6 and is a very good starting point for exploring IPv6. It also gives a fairly complete list of RFCs relating to IPv6. Read More

Answerman
by Todd Whitesel

Last column's mailbag has been crushed by a withering barrage of answers from our readers. This time Todd takes on questions like: "How do I save my screen arrangement for the window program?", "I'm trying to get taylor uucp working on Mac OS X, help!", and "Tracking down culprit of spurious dialing with ppp -demand." Read More

Daemon's Advocate
by Wes Peters

I have been closely following the development of a number of email clients for several years now, anxiously awaiting one that would allow me to ditch Netscape Communicator for the limited and crash-prone rusty tool it is. I've been installing, trying, and deleting email clients so frequently over the past year my home directory on Homer became cluttered with various and sundry email configurations, carefully moved away and saved as I tried the next client. Read More