For a few years I have been trying to create a "distributed cluster storage system" (see below) on standard Linux hardware. I have been unsuccessful. I have looked into buying one and they do exist, but are so expensive I can't afford one. They also are designed for much larger enterprises and have tons of features I don't want or need. I am hoping the Linux community can help me create this low cost "distributed cluster storage system" which I think other small businesses could use. Please help me solve this so we can publish the solution to the open source community.

Have you ever woke up in the morning and said to yourself, “today is the day that I'm finally going to backup my workstation!” only to find out that you're a day late and about 320Gb short? Well, that's about what happened to me recently, but don't worry, the story has a happy ending. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

“Ka-chunk... ka-chunk... ka-chunk... tick... tick... tick... Ka-chunk... ka-chunk...” That's just not a sound you ever want to hear coming from a hard drive. It's the sound of a hard drive trying to move it's read/write heads into a position that they don't seem to want to go to or its trying to read a sector that just isn't there anymore.

Recently I asked you for ideas on creative recycling of waste server heat. The inspiration came from a University of Notre Dame project that warms a botanical garden with waste heat. This edition of The Green Penguin covers your own creative ideas. This idea came from Lorenz in Germany:

A while back, I wrote an article for Linux Journal's web edition entitled “Howto be a good (and lazy) System Administrator.” A couple astute readers, after reading the article, asked if I was familiar with the Nagios monitoring system, and I am. I've been using Nagios for a few years now.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way.

If you're anything like the average System Administrator, you are understaffed, underfunded, and overworked. By now, you've also gotten used to the idea that no one knows you exist until the mail server goes down, then you're suddenly on America's Most Wanted. In this article, I'm also assuming that you have many servers that you are responsible for. I'm also assuming

Its not breaking news, since it happened in March, but Wireshark 1.0 has been released. The news, for me at least, was that Wireshark even existed, never heard of it before. Somebody mentioned it recently when we were trying to diagnose a networking problem.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.