Category Archives: Linux

Speeding up ProFTPD logins

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One year ago I have switched from PureFTPd to ProFTPD because it runs smoother on the virtual server I am running. The server is really easy to setup and maintain, but with the standard configuration it always takes around 5 to 10 seconds to log on to the server. After searching for a solution to these slow logins, it turns out that there is even a point in the FAQ on how to speed up the login process.

Just edit the file /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf and add these 2 lines:

UseReverseDNS off
IdentLookups off

Lesson learned: I should read manuals more often.

Setting up a VPN-server on Amazon EC2

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Amazon has recently announced the new Micro Instances in their Elastic Cloud service. A so called Micro Instance is a virtual machine with 620 MB main memory and CPU power in the area of an 1 GHz Opteron processor. The advantage of the Micro Instance is its low cost of only $0.02 per hour of operation (be advised, there are some additional costs for traffic and storage).

The EC2 Micro Instance is an ideal way to operate your own VPN-server, when you need it only a couple of hours per month. Let’s assume, that you want to use it for about 50 hours per month with around 10 GB of traffic, this means $1.00 for computation time + $1.50 for 15 GB of storage + $1.50 for 10 GB outgoing traffic. So for $4 this is quite a good offer. Granted, you can find commercial VPN providers for $5 per month, but it is more fun to do it yourself. In this article I will describe, how to setup an EC2 instance as a VPN-server.
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Setting up PureFTPD on a virtual server

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PureFTPD Logo PureFTPD is a secure and easy to configure FTP server. It has all the features you usually need, like TLS encryption, virtual users, quotas and limits. The only downside is that PureFTPD is not easy to install on a virtual server because the default Debian package is compiled with some options that are not supported by the standard OpenVZ and Virtuozzo kernels. Therefore you need to recompile PureFTPD with some reasonable settings. In This post I will explain how to do that and do a basic service setup.

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Hosting OpenVZ on Ubuntu 8.04

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The long term support edition 8.04 of Ubuntu Linux will provide security updates until 2013. Therefore it is an ideal distribution for building the base of a secure hosting solution. In this article I will describe how you can setup the virtualization software OpenVZ on Ubuntu 8.04. OpenVZ allows you to run multiple virtual Linux servers on top of your Ubuntu system. It is extremely performant and OpenVZ is also the base of the well known Virtuozzo solution which is widely used in the web hosting market. Compared to Xen, OpenVZ is more limited in regards to different operating system you can run, but on the other hand it has a lower overhead and is therefore more performant. It is also possible to run OpenVZ inside of VirtualBox which is not possible with Xen.

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