I have recently installed some VMWare ESXi machines running on Dell hardware.  These are pretty standard PowerEdge 2850 and 2950 servers.

One of the big problems on ESXi is how to monitor the health of the hardware when using ESXi.
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Further to my post about DSPAM Suexec problems I also ran into a further problem recently with our DSPAM server……

We get A LOT of mail through this system and when I say a lot I mean s***loads, the last count was 51 million emails processed in 9 months!!!!  Anyway, DSPAM uses a set of perl cgi scripts to generate the  web interface which while it works, certainly isn’t cut out for performance.  These cgi scripts use the system.log to build its history and quarantine views and if you still want to be able to use the web interface then you will have to start pruning the system.log file on a regular basis.
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After much testing and general messing about, I have found that the mplayer-plugin for firefox works much better than the realplayer plugin (IMHO). It not only streams typical realmedia but also streams quicktime, windows media (wmv etc) and pretty much every other type of media out there. Also, you do not need the linux binary emulation to get this working.
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So I thought upgrading Apache for a DSPAM anti-spam/anti-virus machine was going to be straightforward!?!?

What was I thinking? OK, so FreeBSD’s ports system is great and generally handles upgrades effortlessly, but I had forgotten what was required for DSPAM and in particular the SUEXEC module.
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This howto is a quick a dirty guide to building OpenVPN on a FreeBSD box (running pf as the firewall), and then connecting a Windows XP client to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever needed to dual boot Windows XP with FreeBSD and wanted to do it via Grub?

Well, here’s how!
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