Comindware Task Management Solution

Comindware Task Management™ is powerful yet very easy to use FREE software to manage daily tasks appearing in your organization. The product is pre-integrated as a part of Comindware Tracker™ receiving and managing tasks appearing during your process execution along with your other tasks. Task tracking has never been so easy with user friendly interface and no hassle of managing complex solution for your task management.

 

Separate different parts of your organization with exclusive Workspaces technology and start creating and managing Tasks for different parts of your organization in minutes.

 

Collaborate. Organize your team work on Tasks through ongoing communication processes through comments and discussions. Attach and share files with a group you’re working with.


 

Follow Tasks and discussions you’re involved in.

 

Manage your schedule and track execution with Calendar, deadlines, notifications, and exclusive Task Schedule view.

 

Stay productive working exclusively through MS Outlook interface you’re familiar with.

 

Move Linux server to XenServer Host

In order to P2V a Linux server to a XenServer host, you need to reboot the machine you want to convert and boot from the XenServer Installation CD. When you see the Welcome to XenServer screen, select OK and the installer will do some hardware detection, etc. After that, you will get four choices, one of them being

Convert an existing OS on this machine to a VM (P2V)

And that’s it! Follow the rest of the prompts and the server will be virtualized. After it is complete, you will need to attach a VIF in order to have external network connectivity.

General Guidelines for Virtualizing Physical Servers

When considering how to best begin virtualizing a collection of physical servers, it is best to gain some comfort level and experience with virtualizing servers that are more simply configured, moving later to servers with more complex configurations.

Good candidates typically include servers that are used for test and development environments, and servers used for in-house IT infrastructure (intranet web servers, DNS, NIS, and other network services, etc.). Typically servers that are doing heavily CPU-intensive tasks (sophisticated mathematical modeling, video rendering) or are I/O-intensive (high-traffic commercial web sites, highly-used database servers, streaming audio/video servers) are not the best candidates for virtualization at the start.

Once you have identified some physical servers that seem reasonable to work on first, you should take a close look at how you are currently using them. What applications are they hosting? How I/O intensive are they? How CPU-intensive are they?

To make a reasonable assessment, you should gather a reasonable amount of data on the current physical servers that you are thinking about virtualizing. Look at system monitoring data for disk usage, CPU usage, memory usage, and network traffic, and consider both peak and average values.
Good candidates for virtualization are:
    •    servers whose CPU and memory usage and NIC and disk throughput are low will be more likely to coexist as a VM on a XenServer Host with a few other VMs without unduly constraining its performance.
    •    servers that are a few years old - so their performance as VMs hosted on a newer server would be comparable to their existing state.
    •    servers that do not use any incompatible hardware which cannot be virtualized, such as dongles, serial or parallel ports, or other unsupported PCI cards (serial cards, cryptographic accelerators, etc.).
Once you have identified a set of machines that you want to virtualize, you should plan the process to accomplish the task. First, provision the physical servers that will serve as your XenServer Hosts. The chief constraint on the number of VMs you can run per XenServer Host is system memory.
Next, plan how you will create the VMs. Your choices are to P2V an existing server, install a fresh server from network-mounted vendor media, or install a base operating system using a pre-existing template.
If you P2V an existing server, it's best to P2V a test instance of the server, and run it in parallel with the existing physical server until you are satisfied that everything works properly in the virtual environment before re-purposing the existing physical machine.
Next, plan how to arrange the desired VMs on the XenServer Hosts. Don't "mix up" servers - assign VMs to specific XenServer Hosts, giving consideration to complementary resource consumption (mixing CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive workloads) and complementary peak usage patterns (for instance, assigning overnight batch processing and daytime interactive workloads to the same XenServer Host).
For configuring individual VMs themselves, keep these guidelines in mind:

    •    create single-processor VMs unless you are serving a multi-threaded application that will perform demonstrably better with a second virtual CPU.

    •    when you configure the memory settings for a VM, consult the documentation for the guest operating system you plan to run in that VM and for the applications you plan to run on them.

Backup/Restore Mysql database

A simple approach on how to backup and restore MySQL databases.

Backup

To save an existing database it is recommended that you create a dump.

• To dump all databases you must run the command:

mysqldump --user=****** --password=****** -A > /path/to/file_dump.SQL 

• To dump several specific databases you must run the command:

mysqldump --user=****** --password=******  db_1 db_2 db_n> /path/to/file_dump.SQL

• To dump all tables from a database you must run the command:

mysqldump --user=****** --password=****** db > /path/to/file_dump.SQL

• To dump specific tables from a database you must run the command:

mysqldump --user=****** --password=****** db --tables tab1 tab2 > /path/to/file_dump.SQL

For each of the following commands you must specify a user (user) and password (password) with administrator rights on the database.

Restore your database

To restore a dump just launch the command:

mysql --user=****** --password=****** db_name < /path/to/file_dump.SQL

Note that

A database dump: is a record of the table structure and the data from a database, usually in the form of a list made of SQL statements.

Change your Hostname without Rebooting in RedHat Linux

Original Article

This tutorial covers changing your hostname in RedHat Linux without having to do a reboot for the changes to take effect. I've tested this on RedHat , Fedora Core , and CentOS . It should work for all the versions in between since they all closely follow the same RedHat configuration.


Make sure you are logged in as root and move to /etc/sysconfig and open the network file in vi.
cd /etc/sysconfig 
vi network



Look for the HOSTNAME line and replace it with the new hostname you want to use. In this example I want to replace localhost with redhat9.

HOSTNAME=redhat9

When you are done, save your changes and exit vi. Next we will edit the /etc/hosts file and set the new hostname.

vi /etc/hosts



In hosts, edit the line that has the old hostname and replace it with your new one.

192.168.1.110  redhat9

Save your changes and exit vi. The changes to /etc/hosts and /etc/sysconfig/network are necessary to make your changes persistent (in the event of an unscheduled reboot).
Now we use the hostname program to change the hostname that is currently set.
hostname redhat9
And run it again without any parameters to see if the hostname changed.
hostname

Finally we will restart the network to apply the changes we made to /etc/hosts and /etc/sysconfig/network.
service network restart

To verify the hostname has been fully changed, logout of your system and you should see your new hostname being used at the login prompt and after you've logged back in.



Quick, painless, and you won't lose your server's uptime.

MySQL Change root Password

How do I change MySQL root password under Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and UNIX like operating system over ssh / telnet session?

Setting up MySQL password is one of the essential tasks. By default root user is MySQL admin account user. Please note that the Linux / UNIX root account for your operating system and MySQL root are different. They are separate and nothing to do with each other. Sometime your may remove mysql root account and setup admin as mysql super user for security purpose.

mysqladmin command to change root password

If you have never set a root password for MySQL server, the server does not require a password at all for connecting as root. To setup root password for first time, use mysqladmin command at shell prompt as follows:
$ mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD
However, if you want to change (or update) a root password, then you need to use the following command:
$ mysqladmin -u root -p'oldpassword' password newpass
For example, If the old password is abc, you can set the new password to 123456, enter:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p'abc' password '123456'

Change MySQL password for other users

To change a normal user password you need to type (let us assume you would like to change password for user asad) the following command:
$ mysqladmin -u asad -p oldpassword password newpass

Changing MySQL root user password using MySQL sql command

This is another method. MySQL stores username and passwords in user table inside MySQL database. You can directly update password using the following method to update or change password for user vivek:
1) Login to mysql server, type the following command at shell prompt:
$ mysql -u root -p
2) Use mysql database (type command at mysql> prompt):

mysql> use mysql;

3) Change password for user asad, enter:

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where User='asad';

4) Finally, reload the privileges:

mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

The last method can be used with PHP, Python or Perl scripting mysql API.

SVNSync

Using svnsync

Original Article

svnsync is a one way replication system for Subversion. It allows you to create a read-only replica of a repository over any RA layer (including http, https, svn, svn+ssh).
First, lets setup the initial sync. We have two repositories, I will skip the details of svnadmin create. For the remote access to the replica repository, I used svnserve, and I added a user with full write access. The destination repository should be completely empty before starting.


So, to make this easier, I am going to put the repository URIs into enviroment variables:

$ export FROMREPO=svn://svn.example.com/
$ export TOREPO=svn://dest.example.com/

Because the svnsync is allowed to rewrite anything on the TOREPO, we need to make sure the commit hooks are configured to allow our ‘svnsync’ user to do anything it wants.
On the server hosting TOREPO, I ran this:

$ echo "#!/bin/sh" > hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ chmod 755 hooks/pre-revprop-change

Now we are ready to setup the sync:

$ svnsync init ${TOREPO} ${FROMREPO}

This will prompt you for the username, password, and also sets several revision properties on the $TOREPO, for revision zero. It doesn’t actually copy any of the data yet. To list the properties that it created, run:

$ svn proplist --revprop -r 0 ${TOREPO}

  svn:sync-from-uuid
  svn:sync-last-merged-rev
  svn:date
  svn:sync-from-url

$ svn propget svn:sync-from-url --revprop -r 0 ${TOREPO}

  svn://svn.example.com/

So all the knowledge about what we are syncing from is stored at the destination repository. No state about this sync is stored in the source repository.
We are now ready to begin copying data:

$ svnsync --non-interactive sync ${TOREPO}

And if everything is setup correctly, you will start replicating data.
Except, I suck. And the first thing I did was hit control+c. I figured this is a cool replication system, so I just ran the sync command from above again, and got this:

$ svnsync --non-interactive sync ${TOREPO}

Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'svn.example.com:0e4e0d98-631d-0410-9a00-9320a90920b3'
svnsync: Couldn't get lock on destination repos after 10 attempts

Oh snap. I guess its not so easy to restart after an aborted sync.
I started debugging, and found that svnsync kept its lock state in a special property in revision zero again.
So, To fix this, we can safely just delete this lock:

$ svn propdel svn:sync-lock --revprop -r 0  ${TOREPO}

Now running sync again works! Hurrah!
After the sync finishes, we will want to keep the replica up to date.
I personally set a ‘live’ sync, but it is also possible to use a crontab or other scheduling method to invoke sync whenever you want.
To setup a live sync, on the FROMREPO server, I appended this to my hooks/post-commit file:

svnsync --non-interactive sync svn://dest.example.com/ &

You will want to make sure that the user-running subversion (and the hook script) has a cached copy of the authentication info for the destination repository.
Unfortunately, the post-commit hook won’t catch everything, so we also need to added this to the post-revprop-change hook:

svnsync --non-interactive copy-revprops  svn://dest.example.com/ ${REV} &

This will help propagate things like editing svn:log messages.
And there you go, thats the path I took to mirror one of my repositories onto another machine.

Cacti Installation on Centos 5.2

Cacti is a GPL-licensed, scalable, RRDtool-based monitoring program with flexible graphing options. This article describes the process of installing and configuring Cacti on CentOS 5.2.

 

Useful links to this installation were BXtra and TechDB.

Per the Cacti documentation, Cacti requires:

RRDTool 1.0.49 or 1.2.x or greater
MySQL 4.1.x or 5.x or greater

PHP 4.3.6 or greater, 5.x greater highly recommended for advanced features

A Web Server e.g. Apache or IIS

I'd also recommend installing vim, net-snmp, net-snmp-utils, php-snmp, initscripts, perl-rrdtool, and any dependencies.

To perform this install, I am logged into Gnome as a normal user, and opened a terminal that is switched to the root user using the su command. I had already installed apache, mysql, and PHP during the original install process of CentOS 5.2.

I added a new repository to facilitate this install. To do this, I created a file
(/etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo) containing Dag Wiers repository, which contains rrdtool, among other things.

[dag]

name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/dag

    gpgcheck=1

 gpgkey=http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt enabled=1


You can create this file by typing vim /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo and copying and pasting the above information into the file. Be warned that the above text containing the repository is version and architecture-specific.

I then typed yum update to update CentOS and the repository list before installing additional software.

I installed everything but cacti through yum. You can verify that you have the packages in question (or the version numbers of installed packages) by attempting to install them, as yum will remind you that you already have the latest version installed, as well as the version status of the packages, like shown here:

# yum install php httpd mysql mysql-server php-mysql vim-enhanced net-snmp net-snmp-utils php-snmp initscripts perl-rrdtool rrdtool initscripts
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: pubmirrors.reflected.net
* updates: mirror.fdcservers.net
* addons: chi-10g-1-mirror.fastsoft.net
* extras: mirror.fdcservers.net
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Package php-5.1.6-23.2.el5_3.i386 already installed and latest version
Package httpd-2.2.3-22.el5.centos.1.i386 already installed and latest version
Package mysql-5.0.45-7.el5.i386 already installed and latest version
Package mysql-server-5.0.45-7.el5.i386 already installed and latest version
Package php-mysql-5.1.6-23.2.el5_3.i386 already installed and latest version
Package 2:vim-enhanced-7.0.109-4.el5_2.4z.i386 already installed and latest version
Package 1:net-snmp-5.3.2.2-5.el5_3.1.i386 already installed and latest version
Package 1:net-snmp-utils-5.3.2.2-5.el5_3.1.i386 already installed and latest version
Package php-snmp-5.1.6-23.2.el5_3.i386 already installed and latest version
Package initscripts-8.45.25-1.el5.centos.i386 already installed and latest version
Package perl-rrdtool-1.3.7-1.el5.rf.i386 already installed and latest version
Package rrdtool-1.3.7-1.el5.rf.i386 already installed and latest version
Package initscripts-8.45.25-1.el5.centos.i386 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do

Download the latest version of Cacti (0.8.7e, as of the writing of this article) from here. I downloaded it to my desktop and unzipped it by right clicking it and selecting "Extract here". I also renamed the cacti-0.8.7e directory by right clicking and selecting "Rename". You could do this in the command line, if you wanted to:

[your root shell] # tar xzvf cacti-0.8.7e.tar.gz
[your root shell] # mv cacti-0.8.7e cacti

Move the entire cacti directory to /var/www/html/ :

[your root shell] # mv cacti /var/www/html

I chose to create a 'cactiuser' user (and cacti group) to run cacti commands and to have ownership of the relavent cacti files. It was here that I noticed that my install did not have any of the /sbin directories in its $PATH , so I simply typed the absolute path:

[your root shell] # /usr/sbin/groupadd cacti

[your root shell] # /usr/sbin/useradd -g cacti cactiuser

[your root shell] # passwd cactiuser

Change the ownership of the /var/www/html/cacti/rra/ and /var/www/html/cacti/log/ directories to the cactiuser we just created:

[your root shell] # cd /var/www/html/cacti
[your root shell] # chown -R cactiuser rra/ log/

Create a mysql root password, if you haven't already (password in this example is samplepass:

[your root shell] # /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password samplepass

Create a MySQL database for cacti:

[your root shell] # mysqladmin --user=root --password=samplepass create cacti

Change directories to the cacti directory, and use the cacti.sql file to create tables for your database:

[your root shell] # cd /var/www/html/cacti
[your root shell- cacti] # mysql --user=root --password=samplepass cacti < cacti.sql

I also created a MySQL username and password for Cacti:

[your root shell] # mysql --user=root --password=samplepass
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 28
Server version: 5.0.45 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'samplepass';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> exit
Bye

Edit /var/www/html/cacti/include/config.php with your favorite editor, and update the information to reflect our cacti configuration (you can leave the other text in the file alone):

/* make sure these values refect your actual database/host/user/password */
$database_type = "mysql";
$database_default = "cacti";
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cactiuser";
$database_password = "samplepass";
$database_port = "3306";

Create a cron job that polls for information for Cacti (I'm choosing to use /etc/crontab here):

[your root shell] # vim /etc/crontab

Add this line to your crontab:

*/5 * * * * cactiuser /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Edit your PHP config file at /etc/php.ini to allow more memory usage for Cacti. It is a relatively large text file- using vim, I search for "memory_limit" by typing /memory_limit in command mode.

[your root shell] # vim /etc/php.ini
I changed memory_limit = 8M to memory_limit = 128M

Before I check to see if Cacti works, I want to check and see if mysqld and httpd are running using the service command.

[your root shell] # /sbin/service mysqld status
[your root shell] # /sbin/service httpd status

If mysqld and httpd are running, great. If not, type:

[your root shell] # /sbin/service mysqld start
[your root shell] # /sbin/service httpd start

If you're an "I need to see what the output looks like" type, here is an example of the previous command:

[your root shell] # /sbin/service mysqld status
mysqld is stopped[your root shell] # /sbin/service mysqld start
Initializing MySQL database: Installing MySQL system tables...
OK
Filling help tables...
OK

To start mysqld at boot time you have to copy
support-files/mysql.server to the right place for your system

PLEASE REMEMBER TO SET A PASSWORD FOR THE MySQL root USER !
To do so, start the server, then issue the following commands:
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h localhost.localdomain password 'new-password'
See the manual for more instructions.
You can start the MySQL daemon with:
cd /usr ; /usr/bin/mysqld_safe &

You can test the MySQL daemon with mysql-test-run.pl
cd mysql-test ; perl mysql-test-run.pl

Please report any problems with the /usr/bin/mysqlbug script!

The latest information about MySQL is available on the web at
http://www.mysql.com
Support MySQL by buying support/licenses at http://shop.mysql.com
[ OK ]
Starting MySQL: [ OK ]

You should now be able to access cacti at http://localhost/cacti from the local computer or from any computer within your LAN network at http://your.internal.IP.address/cacti .

There should be a Cacti Installation Guide window that shows up, giving licensing info and the like. Click "Next".

Select "New Installation", since this is a new installation.

The next window to pop up should tell you whether Cacti could find the paths to all of the elements that Cacti needs to run, such as RRDtool, PHP, snmp stuff, etc. If everything but Cacti was installed via yum, you should be good here. Click "Finish" to save the settings and bring up the login window.

Below is a screenshot of the login window. The default user name is admin. The default password is admin. It should prompt an automatic password change for the admin account when you log in the first time.

If you successfully log in, I'd recommend taking a break here. Depending on how fast you are, your cron job may not have had enough time to run the poller program and create data for your graphs. I'd suggest taking a deep breath, or brewing a cup of tea (or coffee) for yourself.

The localhost machine should have some graph templates that are already created, but you can click the "Create Additional Devices" link to add graphs for any other machines on your network. I added my FreeNAS box (tutorial for that to follow).

After having consumed your beverage of choice, press the "Graphs" button. Cacti should have a graph showing you a couple minutes of data for the machines you have added. The longer your machine is on, the more informational the graphs will be. Also, if you click on a particular graph, Cacti will Congratulations! You're now monitoring!

View the Cacti documentation page for more information on how to take advantages of Cacti.

Below are some graphs that were made using Cacti.