Are you looking to tweak or manage your disks partitions in Linux? In this article, we will review some of the best tools that help Linux users partition and manage their disks. We will see both command line utilities as well as GUI applications for managing disk partitions in Linux.

Read Also: 9 Tools to Monitor Linux Disk Partitions and Usage in Linux

I favor the command line over GUI (graphical user interface), I will start by describing the text based utilities and then GUI applications as follows.

1. Fdisk

fdisk is a powerful and popular command line tool used for creating and manipulating disk partition tables. It supports multiple partition tables formats, including MS-DOS and GPT. It provides a user-friendly, text based and menu driven interface to display, create, resize, delete, modify, copy and move partitions on disks.

2. GNU Parted

Parted is a popular command line tool for managing hard disk partitions. It supports multiple partition table formats, including MS-DOS, GPT, BSD and many more. With it, you can add, delete, shrink and extend disk partitions along with the file systems located on them.

It can help you create space for installing new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, and move data to new hard disks.

3. Gparted

GParted is a free, cross platform and advanced graphical disk partition manager that works on Linux operating systems, Mac OS X and Windows.

It is used to resize, copy, move, label, check or delete partitions without data loss, enabling you to grow or shrink root partition, create space for new operating systems and attempt data rescue from lost partitions. It can be used to manipulate file systems including EXT2/3/4.

4. GNOME Disks a.k.a ( GNOME Disks Utility)

GNOME Disks is a core system utility used for disk partition management and S.M.A.R.T monitoring. It is used to format and create partition on drives, mount and unmount partitions. It ships in with the well known GNOME desktop environment.

Lately, it’s been gaining features for advanced usage. The latest version (at the time of this writing) has a new feature for adding, resizing partitions, checking filesystems for any damages and repairing them.

5. KDE Partition Manager

KDE partition manager is a useful graphical utility for managing disk devices, partitions and file systems on your computer. It comes with the KDE desktop environment.

Most of its underlying work is performed by programs. It can be used to easily create, copy, move, delete, resize without losing data, backup and restore partitions. It supports various including EXT2/3/4, BTRFS NTFS, FAT16/32, XFS, and more.

6. Qtparted

In addition, you can also use Qtparted, is a Partition Magic (proprietary software for Windows) clone and Qt front-end to GNU Parted. Note that it still in development and you may likely experience any kind of problem with latest release. In that case try to use the CVS version or a previous stable version.

It may not be one of the best options now but you can give it a try. More features are yet being added to it.

You might also like to read these following related articles.

1. 4 Tools to Manage EXT2, EXT3 and EXT4 Health in Linux
2. 3 Useful GUI and Terminal Based Linux Disk Scanning Tools
3. Recover Deleted or Lost Files in Linux

These are the best partition managers and editors available for Linux operating systems. Which tool do you use?

Source

Backup on personal computers or servers is always important to prevent permanent data loss. Therefore getting to know different backup tools is very important especially for System Administrators who work with large amounts of enterprise level data and even on personal computers.

It is always a good practice to keep on backing up data on our computers, this can either be done manually or configured to work automatically. Many backup tools have different features that allow users to configure the the type of backup, time of backup, what to backup, logging backup activities and many more

In this article, we shall take a look at 24 outstanding backup tools that you can use on Linux servers or systems.

Honorable Mention – CloudBerry Backup

CloudBerry Backup for Linux is a cross-platform cloud backup solution with advanced backup configuration settings and providing total security of data.

Pybackpack is an open source simple, powerful and user-friendly file backup utility was written for Gnomedesktop only and released under the GPL, but you can also use it for other desktops too. Like you do for other backup applications. The interface is pretty simple and provides a good design which makes the whole process user friendly and much easier.

The pybackpack tool uses back-end as rdiff-backup program for backups. The benefit of using rdiff-backup is, it do full backup at first time and later backups it takes only updated files. This is very crucial in terms of saving disk space and network bandwidth.

Installing Pybackpack Backup Manager

Open the terminal by hitting “Ctr + Alt + t” and run the following command to install Pybackpack backup manager tool under Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/11.10 and Linux Mint 14/13/12

$ sudo apt-get install pybackpack

Once you’ve installed it, launch it from the Desktop Dash or use the following command.

$ pybackpack

Backup /home directory to CD or DVD

Once you’ve start you will see Home tab with “Go” option, if you click on “Go” button, it will backup your entire /home directory including your personal settings, emails, documents and other important files and burn automatically them to a CD or DVD as a iso image file.

Backup /home directory on Local File System

Instead of taking full backup, you can customize your backup by choosing more advanced options by specifying what folders and files you want to include or exclude in your backup. To do this, click on “Backup” tab and then select “New Backup Set” from the drop-down list.

Click on “Edit” option. Now you will see a backup wizard that will guide you through the steps that required to create a set of files for backup, known as “backup set“.

Give name and description for the backup set and also select destination type as “Local File System” from the drop-down list. Enter the default destination directory where the actual backup will be stored. In my case it would be stored under /home/tecmint/Tecmint-Backup directory.

Now add the files and directories that needs to be included or excluded for the backup set. I have included the following files for backup. Nothing excluded, but you can exclude the files that you don’t want to backup.

1. /home/tecmint/Desktop
2. /home/tecmint/Documents
3. /home/tecmint/Downloads
4. /home/tecmint/Music
5. /home/tecmint/Pictures

This gives the full summary of backup for review, if you want to make changes you can click on “Back” button. To proceed with the selection and save the backup click on “Forward“.

Click on “Apply” to Finish the backup wizard.

Finally, click on “Backup” button to create the backup, based on the settings that we have given during the backup set.

Once backup process over, you will get message as “Backup complete“.

To verify, whether backup is successfully completed, go to the backup directory and do “ls -l“. You will see following folders.

Are you worrying why there is “rdiff-backup-data” folder, because pybackpack uses rdiff-backup utility to keep the track of incremental backups. So, next time you run the same backup set, it will only take backup of latest and changed files. It is very effective in terms of saving system disk space and bandwidth.

Backup /home directory to Remote System

Instead of taking backups on CD/DVD or Local system, you can also take backup and keep them on remote server directly. Again create a “New Backup Set” and add the username, hostname and location of backup directory of remote host.

Restore /home directory from Local System

Go to “Restore” tab and select the “Local” and enter your backup destination directory. The restore option automatically detect the name and description of the backup set.

Once I entered the location of backup (i.e. /home/tecmint/Tecmint-Backup), it immediately detect the name and description of the backup set as “Tecmint Home Backup“.

Don’t worry the restore will not overwrite the files and folders, it will create a new folder called “restored_files” under /home directory and restore all files under this directory. For example In my case it would be “/home/tecmint/restored_files/Tecmint Home Backup“.

Restore /home directory from Remote System

Go to “Restore” tab and select the “Remote (SSH)” and enter remote host details like username and hostname/ip address. Give the location of backup directory and click on “Restore” button.

Thats it! If you have any questions or queries do reply me using comment section.

Source

When it comes to backups, experience says it’s better to be safe than sorry. Better to have much than not enough – you get the point. In this article, we will present CloudBerry Backup for Linux, a cross-platform cloud backup and disaster recovery software.

As a leading solution in the industry, CloudBerry stands out for its flexibility, reliability, and its wide set of out-of-the-box features. You not only get to choose where to store your data (locally or using a cloud storage service), but also can encrypt it using AES-128 or AES-256.

With the recent release of version 2.5.1, which introduces support for block-level backups, this tool stands out among its crowd of competitors more than ever. This new feature is particularly important if you need to back up large files with relatively minor changes over time.

With both a GUI and a command-line interface, optional compression to save up on bandwidth and decrease storage costs, and no hidden fees for data restore, CloudBerry is hard to beat!

And this is just the top of the iceberg. Believe me – creating, managing, and restoring backups has never been easier, not even in the cloud computing era. Keep reading to find out more!

Installing CloudBerry Backup for Linux

Although CloudBerry is a commercial product, it provides a full-featured trial version that you can use to test-drive the solution. Additionally, a freeware version for personal use (which provides most of the functionality of the Pro edition, except for data encryption) is also available.

Regardless of the version, licenses are one-time off (pay once, get a perpetual license) with an optional yearly maintenance fee that includes support and free upgrades during that period of time.

First, go the download section of Linux cloud backup and click Download. In the next page, choose the link that corresponds to your distribution.

In this article, we will be installing the solution on a CentOS 7 machine. The installation on other distributions is almost identical, so you should not run into any issues if you stick to this tutorial.

To begin, let’s click on the link for CentOS 6/7 and wait for the download to complete:

Once done, follow these steps to proceed with the installation of CloudBerry Backup for Linux:

1. Browse to the folder where the binary file was downloaded and double click on it. The following window will pop up. Click Install to continue.

When the installation is complete, Install will change to Remove, as you can see in the below image:

2. Open a terminal and enter the following commands to request the trial version. Note the pair of single quotes surrounding CloudBerry Backup:

# cd /opt/local/'CloudBerry Backup'/bin

Next, do

./cbb activateLicense -e "YourEmailHere@YourDomain.com " -t "ultimate"

If the above command returns Success, the trial version is ready to use. To launch it, go to the Internet section in your Applications and click CloudBerry Backup. Next, click Continue Trial and Finish to proceed:

Create a Backup Plan and Choose a Storage Provider

Once we have installed the solution and activated the trial version, we will proceed to set up a backup plan.

3. Here you will be able to select where you will store your data. As you can see, CloudBerry is well integrated with all the major cloud storage service providers.

As a Bring-Your-Own-Storage (BYOS) solution, it allows you to leverage any existing cloud services you may already be using.

Regardless of the chosen backup plan, we are assuming that you have already setup the authentication mechanism. In our case we will go with Azure, and once we have entered a display name of our choosing, one of the access keys to our storage account, the account name, and specified a container name, let’s click OK and Continue:

Next, choose a name for the current backup plan:

Note that, by default, support for block-level backups are disabled. You can choose to enable this feature in this step by checking Use block level backup as you can see below:

When you click Continue, you will be asked to set up a periodic full backup so that the retention policy (more on this in a minute) can be applied on old versions as well.

Now choose the files and folders you want to backup:

You will then be prompted to indicate the kind of files that you want to include or exclude from your backup. You can also enable All files as well, choose whether to use compression, and the kind of encryption that you want to use:

4. Choose a Retention Policy and a backup schedule that suits your needs. This will tell CloudBerry when and how to delete old backup files. If in doubt, go with the defaults:

For the backup schedule, you can choose to run it manually, on a specific date and time, or recurrently on a given frequency. The image below shows a schedule backup that will take place every Friday at 1 pm:

If you wish, you can enable notifications at this point. Note that you can specify a list of recipients separated by semicolons, modify the subject line, and choose to be notified in all cases or only when a backup fails:

5. Run the plan now to check if it works as expected:

The backup plan will then be executed. Depending on the size of the chosen files and folders, it may take a few minutes (or more) to fully synchronize with the remote storage account.

And this is where the block level capability comes in handy: only the modified parts of your files will be uploaded during subsequent backups – allowing you to save up on bandwidth and time!

When the process is complete, a green checkmark will appear next to the backup plan in CloudBerry. Now let’s check our Azure container to ensure that our files are already there. And voilá! It’s not magic – it’s CloudBerry Backup for Linux:

Testing the CloudBerry Backup Restore Functionality

So far so good – on to testing we go!

6. Remove a file from the source (thinkcspy3_latest.zip). Click Restore in the CloudBerry Backup interface and choose the plan to restore from.

Since the steps to set up a restore plan are similar to setting up a backup plan, we will not go into detail – only summarize in the following image. Each step is self-explanatory. In #6, enter the password that you chose when you created the backup plan earlier:

After the restore plan is completed, you should see the file that you removed back in the source. Simple as that!

Summary

In this article, we have explained how to install CloudBerry Backup for Linux, and how to create a backup plan integrated with Microsoft Azure.

Additionally, we showed how easy it is to restore files from the remote storage account back to our machine. Additionally, if you prefer to use the command line to manage backup and restore plans, you can refer to the page of CloudBerry Backup command line interface for Linux.

Easy to install, and much easier to use – totally worth your time and a few bucks to buy a license, isn’t it?

As always, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or comments about this article. The feedback of our readers is always highly appreciated.

Source

How to Install Your Own Cloud Platform with OpenStack in RHEL/CentOS 7

OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform which provides IAAS (infrastructure-as-a-service) for public and private clouds.

OpenStack platform consists of several inter-related projects that control hardware, storage, networking resources of a datacenter, such as: Compute, Image Service, Block Storage, Identity Service, Networking, Object Storage, Telemetry, Orchestration and Database.

The administration of those components can be managed through the web-based interface or with the help of OpenStack command line.

This tutorial will guide you on how you can deploy your own private cloud infrastructure with OpenStackinstalled on a single node in CentOS 7 or RHEL 7 or Fedora distributions by using rdo repositories, although the deployment can be achieved on multiple nodes.

Requirements

1. Minimal Installation of CentOS 7
2. Minimal Installation of RHEL 7

Step 1: Initial System Configurations

1. Before you begin preparing the node in order to deploy your own virtual cloud infrastructure, first login with root account and assure that the system is up to date.

2. Next, issue the ss -tulpn command to list all running services.

# ss -tulpn

3. Next, identify, stop, disable and remove unneeded services, mainly postfix, NetworkManager and firewalld. At the end the only daemon that would be running on your machine should be sshd.

# systemctl stop postfix firewalld NetworkManager
# systemctl disable postfix firewalld NetworkManager
# systemctl mask NetworkManager
# yum remove postfix NetworkManager NetworkManager-libnm

4. Completely disable Selinux policy on the machine by issuing the below commands. Also edit /etc/selinux/config file and set SELINUX line from enforcing to disabled as illustrated on the below screenshot.

# setenforce 0
# getenforce
# vi /etc/selinux/config

5. On the next step using the hostnamectl command to set your Linux system hostname. Replace the FQDNvariable accordingly.

# hostnamectl set-hostname cloud.centos.lan

6. Finally, install ntpdate command in order to synchronize time with a NTP server on your premises near your physical proximity.

# yum install ntpdate 

Step 2: Install OpenStack in CentOS and RHEL

7. OpenStack will be deployed on your Node with the help of PackStack package provided by rdo repository (RPM Distribution of OpenStack).

In order to enable rdo repositories on RHEL 7 run the below command.

# yum install https://www.rdoproject.org/repos/rdo-release.rpm 

On CentOS 7, the Extras repository includes the RPM that actives the OpenStack repository. Extras is already enabled, so you can easily install the RPM to setup the OpenStack repository:

# yum install -y centos-release-openstack-mitaka
# yum update -y

8. Now it’s time to install PackStack package. Packstack represents a utility which facilitates the deployment on multiple nodes for different components of OpenStack via SSH connections and Puppet modules.

Install Packstat package in Linux with the following command:

# yum install  openstack-packstack

9. On the next step generate an answer file for Packstack with the default configurations which will be later edited with the required parameters in order to deploy a standalone installation of Openstack (single node).

The file will be named after the current day timestamp when generated (day, month and year).

# packstack --gen-answer-file='date +"%d.%m.%y"'.conf
# ls

10. Now edit the generated answer configuration file with a text editor.

# vi 13.04.16.conf

and replace the following parameters to match the below values. In order to be safe replace the passwords fields accordingly.

CONFIG_NTP_SERVERS=0.ro.pool.ntp.org

Please consult http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/ server list in order to use a public NTP server near your physical location.

CONFIG_PROVISION_DEMO=n

CONFIG_KEYSTONE_ADMIN_PW=your_password  for Admin user

Access OpenStack dashboard via HTTP with SSL enabled.

CONFIG_HORIZON_SSL=y

The root password for MySQL server.

CONFIG_MARIADB_PW=mypassword1234

Setup a password for nagiosadmin user in order to access Nagios web panel.

CONFIG_NAGIOS_PW=nagios1234

11. After you finished editing save and close the file. Also, open SSH server configuration file and uncomment PermitRootLogin line by removing the front hashtag as illustrated on the below screenshot.

# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Then restart SSH service to reflect changes.

# systemctl restart sshd

Step 3: Start Openstack Installation Using Packstack Answer File

12. Finally start Openstack installation process via the answer file edited above by running the below command syntax:

# packstack --answer-file 13.04.16.conf

13. Once the installation of OpenStack components is successfully completed, the installer will display a few lines with the local dashboard links for OpenStack and Nagios and the required credentials already configured above in order to login on both panels.

The credentials are also stored under your home directory in keystonerc_admin file.

14. If for some reasons the installation process ends with an error regarding httpd service, open /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf file and make sure you comment the following line as illustrated below.

#Listen 443 https

Then restart Apache daemon to apply changes.

# systemctl restart httpd.service

Note: In case you still can’t browse Openstack web panel on port 443 restart the installation process from beginning with the same command issued for the initial deployment.

# packstack --answer-file /root/13.04.16.conf

Step 4: Remotely Access OpenStack Dashboard

15. In order to access OpenStack web panel from a remote host in your LAN navigate to your machine IP Address or FQDN/dashboard via HTTPS protocol.

Due to the fact that you’re using a Self-Signed Certificate issued by an untrusted Certificate Authority an error should be displayed on your browser.

Accept the error and login to the dashboard with the user admin and the password set on CONFIG_KEYSTONE_ADMIN_PW parameter from answer file set above.

https://192.168.1.40/dashboard 

16. Alternatively, if you opted to install Nagios component for OpenStack, you can browse Nagios web panel at the following URI and login with the credentials setup in answer file.

https://192.168.1.40/nagios 

That’s all! Now you can start setup your own internal cloud environment. Now follow the next tutorial that will explain how to link the server physical NIC to openstack bridge interface and manage Openstack from web panel.

How to Configure OpenStack Network to Enable Access to OpenStack Instances

This tutorial will guide you on how you can configure OpenStack networking service in order to allow access from external networks to OpenStack instances.

Requirements

1. Install OpenStack in RHEL and CentOS 7

Step 1: Modify Network Interface Configuration Files

1. Before starting to create OpenStack networks from dashboard, first we need to create an OVS bridge and modify our physical network interface to bind as a port to OVS bridge.

Thus, login to your server terminal, navigate to network interfaces directory scripts and use the physical interface as an excerpt to setup OVS bridge interface by issuing the following commands:

# cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/
# ls  
# cp ifcfg-eno16777736 ifcfg-br-ex

2. Next, edit and modify the bridge interface (br-ex) using a text editor as illustrated below:

# vi ifcfg-br-ex

Interface br-ex excerpt:

TYPE="Ethernet"
BOOTPROTO="none"
DEFROUTE="yes"
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
IPV6INIT="no"
IPV6_AUTOCONF="no"
IPV6_DEFROUTE="no"
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
NAME="br-ex"
UUID="1d239840-7e15-43d5-a7d8-d1af2740f6ef"
DEVICE="br-ex"
ONBOOT="yes"
IPADDR="192.168.1.41"
PREFIX="24"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="127.0.0.1"
DNS2="192.168.1.1"
DNS3="8.8.8.8"
IPV6_PEERDNS="no"
IPV6_PEERROUTES="no"
IPV6_PRIVACY="no"

3. Do the same with the physical interface (eno16777736), but make sure it looks like this:

# vi ifcfg-eno16777736

Interface eno16777736 excerpt:

TYPE="Ethernet"
BOOTPROTO="none"
DEFROUTE="yes"
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
IPV6INIT="no"
IPV6_AUTOCONF="no"
IPV6_DEFROUTE="no"
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
NAME="eno16777736"
DEVICE="eno16777736"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE=”OVSPort”
DEVICETYPE=”ovs”
OVS_BRIDGE=”br-ex”

Important: While editing interfaces cards make sure you replace the physical interface name, IPs and DNS servers accordingly.

4. Finally, after you’ve modified edited both network interfaces, restart network daemon to reflect changes and verify the new configurations using ip command.

# systemctl restart network.service
# ip a

Step 2: Create a New OpenStack Project (Tenant)

5. On this step we need to use Openstack dashboard in order to further configure our cloud environment.

Login to Openstack web panel (dashboard) with admin credentials and go to Identity -> Projects -> Create Project and create a new project as illustrated below.

6. Next, navigate to Identity -> Users -> Create User and create a new user by filling all the fields with the required information.

Assure that this new user has the Role assigned as a _member_ of the newly created tenant (project).

Step 3: Configure OpenStack Network

7. After the user has been created, log out admin from dashboard and log in with the new user in order to create two networks (internal network and external).

Navigate to Project -> Networks -> Create Network and setup the internal network as follows:

Network Name: internal
Admin State: UP
Create Subnet: checked

Subnet Name: internal-tecmint
Network Address: 192.168.254.0/24
IP Version: IPv4
Gateway IP: 192.168.254.1

DHCP: Enable

Use the below screenshots as a guide. Also, replace the Network Name, Subnet Name and IP addresses with your own custom settings.

8. Next, use the same steps as above to create the external network. Make sure the IP address space for external network is in the same network range as your uplink bridge interface IP address range in order to work properly without extra routes.

Therefore, if the br-ex interface has 192.168.1.1 as a default gateway for 192.168.1.0/24 network, the same network and gateway IPs should be configured for external network too.

Network Name: external
Admin State: UP
Create Subnet: checked

Subnet Name: external-tecmint
Network Address: 192.168.1.0/24
IP Version: IPv4
Gateway IP: 192.168.1.1

DHCP: Enable

Again, replace the Network Name, Subnet Name and IP addresses according to your own custom configurations.

9. On the next step we need to log in OpenStack dashboard as admin and mark the external network as Externalin order to be able to communicate with the bridge interface.

Thus, login with admin credentials and move to Admin -> System-> Networks, click on the external network, check the External Network box and hit on Save Changes to apply the configuration.

When done, logout from admin user and log in with the custom user again to proceed to the next step.

10. Finally, we need to create a router for our two networks in order to move packets back and forth. Go to Project -> Network -> Routers and hit on Create Router button. Add the following settings for the router.

Router Name: a descriptive router name
Admin State: UP
External Network: external 

11. Once the Router has been created you should be able to see it in the dashboard. Click on the router name, go to Interfaces tab and hit on Add Interface button and a new prompt should appear.

Select the internal subnet, leave the IP Address field blank and hit on Submit button to apply changes and after a few seconds your interface should become Active.

12. In order to verify OpenStack network settings, go to Project -> Network -> Network Topology and a network map will be presented as illustrated on the below screenshot.

That’s all! Your OpenStack network is now functional and ready for virtual machines traffic. On the next topic we’ll discuss how to create and launch an OpenStack image instance.

How to Create, Deploy and Launch Virtual Machines in OpenStack

In this guide we will learn how to create images and launch an instance of an image (virtual machine) in OpenStack and how to gain control over an instance via SSH.

Requirements

1. Install OpenStack in RHEL and CentOS 7
2. Configure OpenStack Networking Service

Step 1: Allocate Floating IP to OpenStack

1. Before you deploy an OpenStack image, first you need to assure that all pieces are in place and we’ll start by allocating floating IP.

Floating IP allows external access from outside networks or internet to an Openstack virtual machine. In order to create floating IPs for your project, login with your user credentials and go to Project -> Compute -> Access & Security -> Floating IPs tab and click on Allocate IP to The Project.

Choose external Pool and hit on Allocate IP button and the IP address should appear in dashboard. It’s a good idea to allocate a Floating IP for each instance you run.

Step 2: Create an OpenStack Image

2. OpenStack images are just virtual machines already created by third-parties. You can create your own customized images on your machine by installing an Linux OS in a virtual machine using a virtualization tool, such as KVM, VirtualBox, VMware or Hyper-V.

Once you have installed the OS, just convert the file to raw and upload it to your OpenStack cloud infrastructure.

To deploy official images provided by major Linux distributions use the following links to download the latest packaged images:

1. CentOS 7 – http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/images/
2. CentOS 6 – http://cloud.centos.org/centos/6/images/
3. Fedora 23 – https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/23/Cloud/
4. Ubuntu – http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/
5. Debian – http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/current/
6. Windows Server 2012 R2 – https://cloudbase.it/windows-cloud-images/#download

Official images additionally contain the cloud-init package which is responsible with SSH key pair and user data injection.

On this guide we’ll deploy a test image, for demonstration purposes, based on a lightweight Cirros cloud image which can be obtained by visiting the following link http://download.cirros-cloud.net/0.3.4/.

The image file can be used directly from the HTTP link or downloaded locally on your machine and uploaded to OpenStack cloud.

To create an image, go OpenStack web panel and navigate to Project -> Compute -> Images and hit on Create Image button. On the image prompt use the following settings and hit on Create Image when done.

Name: tecmint-test
Description: Cirros test image
Image Source: Image Location  #Use Image File if you’ve downloaded the file locally on your hard disk
Image Location: http://download.cirros-cloud.net/0.3.4/cirros-0.3.4-i386-disk.img 
Format: QCOWW2 – QEMU Emulator
Architecture: leave blank
Minimum Disk: leave blank
Minimum RAM: leave blank
Image Location: checked
Public: unchecked
Protected: unchecked

Step 3: Launch an Image Instance in OpenStack

3. Once you’ve created an image you’re good to go. Now you can run the virtual machine based on the image created earlier in your cloud environment.

Move to Project -> Instances and hit on Launch Instance button and a new window will appear.

4. On the first screen add a name for your instance, leave the Availability Zone to nova, use one instance count and hit on Next button to continue.

Choose a descriptive Instance Name for your instance because this name will be used to form the virtual machine hostname.

5. Next, select Image as a Boot Source, add the Cirros test image created earlier by hitting the + button and hit Next to proceed further.

6. Allocate the virtual machine resources by adding a flavor best suited for your needs and click on Next to move on.

7. Finally, add one of the OpenStack available networks to your instance using the + button and hit on Launch Instance to start the virtual machine.

8. Once the instance has been started, hit on the right arrow from Create Snapshot menu button and choose Associate Floating IP.

Select one of the floating IP created earlier and hit on Associate button in order to make the instance reachable from your internal LAN.

9. To test the network connectivity for your active virtual machine issue a ping command against the instance floating IP address from a remote computer in your LAN.

10. In case there’s no issue with your instance and the ping command succeeds you can remotely login via SSH on your instance.

Use the instance View Log utility to obtain Cirros default credentials as illustrated on the below screenshots.

11. By default, no DNS name servers will be allocated from the internal network DHCP server for your virtual machine. This problem leads to domain connectivity issues from instance counterpart.

To solve this issue, first stop the instance and go to Project -> Network -> Networks and edit the proper subnet by hitting the Subnet Details button.

Add the required DNS name servers, save the configuration, start and connect to the instance console to test if the new configuration has been applied by pinging a domain name. Use the following screenshots as a guide.

In case you have limited physical resources in your infrastructure and some of your instances refuse to start, edit the following line from nova configuration file and restart the machine in order to apply changes.

# vi /etc/nova/nova.conf

Change the following line to look like this:

ram_allocation_ratio=3.0

That’s all! Although this series of guides just scratched the surface of OpenStack mammoth, now you have the basic knowledge to start create new tenants and use real Linux OS images in order to deploy virtual machines in your own OpenStack cloud infrastructure.

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One of the serious needs of a Linux system is to be kept up to date regularly with the latest security patches or updates available for the corresponding distribution.

In a previous article, we’ve explained how to configure automatic security update in Debian/Ubuntu, in this article we will explain how to set up your CentOS/RHEL 7/6 distribution to auto update essential security packages when needed.

Other Linux distributions in the same families (Fedora or Scientific Linux) can be configured similarly.

Configure Automatic Security Updates on CentOS/RHEL Systems

On CentOS/RHEL 7/6, you will need to install the following package:

# yum update -y && yum install yum-cron -y

Enable Automatic Security Updates on CentOS/RHEL 7

Once the installation is complete, open /etc/yum/yum-cron.conf and locate these lines – you will have to make sure that the values matches those listed here:

update_cmd = security
update_messages = yes
download_updates = yes
apply_updates = yes

The first line indicates that the unattended update command will be:

# yum --security upgrade

whereas the other lines enable notifications and automatic download and installation of security upgrades.

The following lines are also required to indicate that notifications will be sent via email from root@localhost to the same account (again, you may choose another one if you want).

emit_via = email
email_from = root@localhost
email_to = root

Enable Automatic Security Updates on CentOS/RHEL 6

By default, the cron is configured to download and install all updates immediately, but we can change this behavior in /etc/sysconfig/yum-cron configuration file by modifying these two parameters to yes.

# Don't install, just check (valid: yes|no)
CHECK_ONLY=yes

# Don't install, just check and download (valid: yes|no)
# Implies CHECK_ONLY=yes (gotta check first to see what to download)
DOWNLOAD_ONLY=yes

To enable email notification that about the security package updates, set the MAILTO parameter to a valid mail address.

# by default MAILTO is unset, so crond mails the output by itself
# example:  MAILTO=root
MAILTO=admin@tecmint.com

Finally, start and enable the yum-cron service:

------------- On CentOS/RHEL 7 ------------- 
systemctl start yum-cron
systemctl enable yum-cron

------------- On CentOS/RHEL 6 -------------  
# service yum-cron start
# chkconfig --level 35 yum-cron on

Congrats! You have successfully set up unattended upgrades on CentOS/RHEL 7/6.

Summary

In this article we have discussed how to keep your server updated regularly with the latest security patches or updates. Additionally, you learned how to configure email notifications in order to keep yourself updated when new patches are applied.

If you have any concerns about this article? Feel free to drop us a note using the comment form below. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Red Hat, Inc. the largest company in Open Source world, released last month one of their major enterprise products – RHEL 7.0 – Red Hat Enterprise Linux, designed for modern datacenters, new cloud platforms and big data.

Among other important improvement like switching to systemd, who now manages daemons, processes and other important system resources even for init services that are now passed through systemd start-up, use of Linux Containers with Docker, cross-realm trust for Microsoft Active Directory, one important aspect represents the XFS as the default filesystem, which can support filesystems up to 16 exabytes and files up to 8 exabytes.

Requirements:

You must have an active Red Hat subscription to download RHEL 7.0 ISO image from Red Hat Customer Portal.

1. RHEL 7.0 Binary DVD ISO image

Although RHEL can be installed on a variety of platforms, such as AMD 64, Intel 64, IBM System Z, IBM Power, etc. This tutorial covers the RHEL 7.0 basic minimal installation with on an Intel x86-64 processor architecture using a binary DVD ISO image, an installation best suited for developing a high customizable server platform with no Graphical Interface.

Installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0

1. After registering on Red Hat Customer Portal go to Download section and grab the last version of RHEL DVD Binary ISO image, then burn it to a DVD media or create a USB bootable media using Unetbootin LiveUSB Creator.

2. Then place the DVD/USB in your appropriate system drive, start your computer, select bootable unit and on the first RHEL prompt select Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0.

3. After the system loads, select the language for installation process and hit on Continue.

4. When the installer gets on Installation Summary it’s time to customize the installation process. First click on Date & Time, choose your system location from the provided map and hit on Done to apply configuration.

5. The next step is to change Language System Support and Keyboard language. Click on both if you want to change or add other languages to your system but for a server the recommendation is to stick with English language.

6. If you want to use other sources than the ones provided by the DVD media hit on Installation Source and add your Additional Repositories or specify a network location using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or NFS protocols then hit on Done to use your new sources. If you can’t provide other sources stick to default one Auto-detected installation media.

7. The next important step is to select your system software. Click on Software Selection and choose your Base Installation Environment from the down-list. For a highly customizable platform where you can install only the packages that you need after the installation, choose Minimal Install with Compatibility Libraries Add-ons, then hit on Done to apply this changes to installation process.

8. The next important step is to configure your system partitions. Click on Installation Destination, select LVMas partition scheme for a
better management over system space, then hit on Click here to create them automatically.

9. After the installer presents you with default system partition scheme you can edit in any way that suits you (delete and recreate partitions and mount points, change partitions space capacity and file system type, etc.). As the base scheme for a server you should use dedicated partitions such as:

1. /boot – 500 MB – non-LVM
2. /root – min 20 GB – LVM
3. /home – LVM
4. /var – min 20 GB – LVM

With XFS filesystem, which is the most advanced filesystem in the world. After editing partitions hit on Update Setting button, then click on Done then Accept Changes on Summary of Changes prompt to apply new configurations.

As a note, if your Hard-Disk is larger than 2TB in size the installer automatically will convert partition table to GPT disks and if you want to use GPT table on disks smaller than 2TB, then you should pass the argument inst.gpt to the boot command line in order to change the default behaviour.

10. The last step before continuing with installation process is setting your Network Connection. Click on Network & Hostname and setup your system hostname. Here you can use your short system hostname or you can append the dot domain (FQDN).

11. After setting up hostname bring up your Network Interface by switching the top Ethernet button to ON. If your network provides automatic Interface configurations through a DHCP server your IPs should be visible on Ethernet Interface Card else go to Configure button and provide your static network settings for your appropriate network connection.

12. After finishing editing Ethernet Interface settings hit on Done which you bring you to default window installer and after you check on your installation settings hit on Begin Installation to proceed further with system installation.

13. As the installation begins writing the system components on your hard-disk, you need to supply your Root Password and create a new User. Click on Root Password and try choose a strong with one at least eight characters in length (alpha-numerical and special characters) and hit in Done when you finish.

14. Then move to User Creation and provide your credentials for this new user. A good idea is to use this user as a system administrator with root powers through sudo command by checking the box Make this user administrator, then click on Done and wait for the installation process to finish.

15. After the installation finishes the installer will announce that everything completed with success so you should be ready to use your system after reboot.

Congratulation! Remove you installation media and reboot your computer and you can now login to your new minimal Red Hat Linux 7.0 environment and perform other system tasks for beginning like register you system to a Red Hat Subscription, activate your system Repositories, update you system and install other useful tools needed to run day to day tasks.

These all tasks can be discussed in my upcoming article. Till then stay tuned to Tecmint for more such howto’s and don’t forget to give your feedback about the installation.

Source

This tutorial will guide you on how to perform a minimal installation of latest version of CentOS 7.0, using the binary DVD ISO image, an installation that is best suitable for developing a future customizable server platform, with no Graphical User Interface, where you can install only the software that you need.

If you want to find out more about what’s new in this release of CentOS 7.0 holds and download links, I suggest reading the previous article on release announcements:

1. CentOS 7.0 Features and Download ISO Images

Requirements

1. CentOS 7.0 DVD ISO

CentOS 7.0 Installation Process

1. After downloading the last version of CentOS using above links or using official CentOS download page. Burn it to a DVD or create a bootable USB stick using LiveUSB Creator called Unetbootin.

2. After you have created the installer bootable media, place your DVD/USB into your system appropriate drive, start the computer, select your bootable unit and the first CentOS 7 prompt should appear. At the prompt choose Install CentOS 7 and press [Enter] key.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) allows modern businesses to store their data, collect it from a wide variety of sources, and easily analyze it from anywhere. With its robust security, compliance capabilities, management and native analytics tools, Amazon S3 stands out in the cloud storage industry.

On top of this, data is stored redundantly in multiple, physically-separate data centers with independent power substations. In other words, S3 gets you covered no matter what.

What can be more perfect than that? CloudBerry, the #1 cross-platform cloud backup software, can be seamlessly integrated with Amazon S3. This gives you the experience, support, and functionality of 2 heavy weights in one place. Let’s take a few minutes to discover how you can harness the power of these solutions to backup your files in the cloud.

Installing and Activating CloudBerry License

In this article we will install and configure CloudBerry on a CentOS 7 desktop system. The instructions provided in CloudBerry Backup for Linux: Review and Installation should apply with minimal (if any) modifications on other desktop distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, or Debian.

The installation process can be summarized as follows:

1. 1. Download the free trial from the CloudBerry Linux Backup Solution page.
   2. Double click on the file, and choose Install.
   3. Remove the installation file.
   4. To activate the trial license, open a terminal and run the following commands (note the pair of single quotes around CloudBerry Backup in the first one):

# cd /opt/local/'CloudBerry Backup'/bin
# ./cbb activateLicense -e "YourEmailHere@YourDomain.com" -t "ultimate"

1. Go to the Internet or Office section under your Applications menu.
2. Choose CloudBerry Backup and Continue trial, then click Finish.

That’s all – now let’s configure CloudBerry to use Amazon S3 as our cloud storage solution.

Configuring CloudBerry + Amazon S3

Integrating CloudBerry and Amazon S3 is a walk in the park:

To begin, click the Settings menu and choose Amazon S3 & Glacier from the list. You will also need to choose a descriptive Display Name, and enter your Access and Secret keys.

These should be available from your Amazon S3 account, as is the Bucket where you will be storing your data. When you’re done, look under Backup Storage to find the newly created backup solution:

Hint: You can now go to the Backup tab to indicate how many versions of files you want to keep, and whether you want to follow soft links or not, among other settings.

Next, to create a backup plan, choose the Backup menu and the cloud storage we created earlier:

Now specify a plan name:

and indicate the location you want to backup:

Do you want to exclude certain types of files? That’s not a problem:

Encryption and compression to increase data transfer speeds and security? You bet:

You can either use the backup retention policy defined for the whole product, or create one specifically for the current plan. We will go with the first here. Finally, let’s specify the backup frequency or method that best suits our needs:

At the end of the plan creation, CloudBerry lets you run it. You can either do that or wait until the next scheduled backup to happen. If any errors happen, you will get a notification at the registered email address prompting you to correct what’s wrong.

In the following image we can see that S3 Transfer Acceleration is not enabled in the tecmint bucket. We can either enable it following the instructions provided in Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration page or remove this feature from our plan’s current configuration.

After we have corrected the above issue, let’s run the backup again. This time it succeeds:

Note that you can store multiple versions of the same file(s) as indicated earlier. To distinguish one from another, a timestamp is added at the end of the path (20180317152702) as you can see in the above image.

Restoring Files from Amazon S3

Of course, backing up our files would be useless if we can’t restore them when we need them. To set up a restoration process, click the Restore menu and choose the plan you will be using. Since the steps involved are pretty straightforward, we will not go into detail here. However, let’s summarize the steps as a quick reference:

• Indicate restore method: restore once (when you press Finish in the last wizard step) or create a Restoreplan to run at a specified time.
• If you are storing multiple versions of your file(s), you will need to tell CloudBerry if you want to restore the latest version or the one at a specific point in time.
• Specify the file(s) and directories you want to restore.
• Enter the decryption password. This is the same that was used to encrypt the file(s) in the first place.

Once done, the restore will be performed automatically. As you can see in the following image, the file tecmintamazons3.txt was restored after being deleted manually from /home/gacanepa:

Congratulations! You have set up a complete backup and restore solution in less than 30 minutes.

Summary

In this post we have explained how to backup your file(s) to and from Amazon S3 using CloudBerry. With all the features offered by these 2 tools, you don’t need to look any further for your backup needs.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach us using the comment form.

Source

SSL Certificates fall into two broad categories: 1) Self-Signed Certificate which is an identity certificate that is signed by the same entity whose identity it certifies-on signed with its own private key, and 2) Certificates that are signed by a CA (Certificate Authority) such as Let’s Encrypt, Comodo and many other companies.

Self-Signed Certificates are commonly used in test environments for LAN services or applications. They can be generated for free using OpenSSL or any related tool. On the other hand, for sensitive, public-facing production services, applications or websites, it is highly recommended to use a certificate issued and verified by a trusted CA.

The first step towards acquiring an SSL certificate issued and verified by a CA is generating a CSR (short for Certificate Signing Request).

In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) on a Linux system.

Creating a CSR – Certificate Signing Request in Linux

To create a CSR, you need the OpenSSL command line utility installed on your system, otherwise, run the following command to install it.

$ sudo apt install openssl  [On Debian/Ubuntu]
$ sudo yum install openssl  [On CentOS/RHEL]
$ sudo dnf install openssl  [On Fedora]

Then issue the following command to generate a CSR and the key that will protect your certificate.

$ openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout example.com.key -out example.com.csr

where:

• req enables the part of OpenSSL that handles certificate requests signing.
• -newkey rsa:2048 creates a 2048-bit RSA key.
• -nodes means “don’t encrypt the key”.
• -keyout example.com.key specifies the filename to write on the created private key.
• -out example.com.csr specifies the filename to write the CSR to.

Answer correctly, the questions you will be asked. Note that your answers should match information in legal documents regarding the registration of your company. This information is critically checked by the CA before issuing your certificate.

After creating your CSR, view the contents of the file using a cat utility, select it and copy it.

$ cat example.com.csr

Then go back to your CA’s website, log in, go to the page will contain the SSL certificate you purchased, and activate it. Then in a window such as the one below, paste your CSR in the correct input field.

In this example, we created a CSR for a multiple domain certificate purchased from Namecheap.

Then follow the rest of the instructions to initiate activation of your SSL certificate. For more information about OpenSSL command, see its man page:

$ man openssl

That’s all for now! Always remember that the first step to getting your own SSL certificate from a CA is to generate a CSR. Use the feedback form below to ask any questions or share your comments with us.

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