Wikipedia’s definition is “A paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.”

This basically means getting a service from a system that you do not need to worry about, everything you need will be available at your fingertips for either free or paid for services. It will make use of the existing internet infrastructure and allow you to collaborate more efficiently, and take your work to any internet connected computer around the world and continue from where you left off.

This sounds great but what will it mean for the future of computing? Will we be controlled on the services we are allowed to use? Will our privacy be breached by the hosting companies that provide cloud services in a big brother way?

On the up hand licensed products can be better controlled and the monies that are suppose to go to the companies that produce them should reach there so they can invest further to develop better products and not to the hands of the pirates on the internet providing copies for free. We all know that free software sites that provide licensed copies for free make money from advertising so the more people visiting them will increase the amount of revenue these sites make this could be dramatically reduced if software services were provided through the cloud but would this make the software vendors charge more for products?

I think there are good points and bad points for cloud computing but decide for yourselves.

I am trying out this free cloud operating system I found today called icloud. I created an account on www.icloud.com to experience a cloud computing desktop through an internet browser. I think it is quite good especially as it is a free service; it gives you a word processor, instant messenger, calendar and 3 GB of storage plus a whole load of other features you would expect from a standard operating system.

What are your thoughts on the cloud?

At the end of last year a client asked me for a recession friendly intranet server solution so his users could keep up to date with the latest company information, access common documents like holiday request forms etc.

He wanted something easy to maintain by anyone. He had been looking at SharePoint as an option. (An expensive option in my eyes) But within two days I had the solution, had it approved, and implemented it for him, this is what I did.

I set him up an Ubuntu Server with OpenSSH, Apache 2, MySQL, PHP, VSFTPD, and a Drupal content management system, on an old P4 that happened to be available for use saving on expensive hardware.

I did this using Ubuntu 8.10 and Drupal 6.9. Why Ubuntu, well it is the simplest OS to set up from install with the LAMP stack, and openSSH as an option during the install process. There is no need to configure much and it will work as soon as it is installed.

I will write how to do this using the latest Ubuntu 9.04 Server version, and Drupal 6.13.

Installing Ubuntu Server 9.04

Download and burn your image of Ubuntu Server from www.ubuntu.com, I have gone for the 32 bit version.

1) Boot from the CD image, and select your language.

2) Select ‘Install Ubuntu Server’

3) Choose the language for the installation process.

4) Choose your country.

5) At the auto detect keyboard layout screen I selected no as I wanted to make sure I got the right keyboard installed plus in the 8.10 version it did not detect properly.

6) As I selected no to auto detect the keyboard I had to choose my keyboard layout according to country in my case it was UK.

7) The next screen tries to eliminate the various UK keyboards I selected the default UK one.

8.) Choose the hostname for the server in my example I will name it intranet server

9) The partitioning section comes up the default partition scheme is to use the entire disk with LVM. (Click on LVM to find out what it means) select this option.

10) Confirm the disk to partition

11) Confirm write changes to the disk

12) Partitioning size confirmation for future upgradability. I Kept the default size

13) Confirm write changes to the disk

14) Add in the full name for a normal user that will use the system (maybe an admin) this will not have root privileges.

15) Add a username for this user usually the name entered previously is used as default but this can be changed.

16) Choose a password for this account and confirm the password. If it is week you will be prompted but you may continue by saying yes use week password.

17) Say no to encrypt your home directory unless you want it encrypted.

18) As we are using this as an internal system we will not need to configure a HTTP proxy just leave it blank and click next.

19) Choose the update method for the server, I would use the ‘no automatic updates’ setting in case any of the new updates disrupts anything we are installing. It is good practice to know what is being updated on a server.

20) In software selection choose LAMP server and OpenSSH server this will take care of Apache, MySQL, and the SSH connection protocol.

21) Choose a MySQL root password and confirm it.

22) The install finishes off and ejects the CD and asks for a reboot, remove the CD and click continue to reboot.

23) Once rebooted login with your username you created and password

If you successfully log in congratulations you have just set up a server with Apache, MySQL, PHP, and OpenSSH.

First things first and that is to update the software repository database so you can get the latest Ubuntu released software. Type in “sudo apt-get update” followed by your password.

You can now connect to your server through SSH, to do this from a Windows PC just use a program like putty and type in the IP address for the server. To get the IP address type in ‘ifconfig’ in a console prompt and take note of the IP address.

You can now run the server without a monitor and keyboard attached, and control it via another computer on the network through SSH. This could be enough to start an Intranet using HTML and PHP but we want easy management.

Next comes a content management system to take care of the content without the need for an editor again saving on costs. My preferred choice for this is Drupal.

Installing Drupal

We need to obtain our copy of Drupal so type in “sudo wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.13.tar.gz” this will download the Drupal file into your current directory. The default is your home directory.

We need to unpack the files issue the command “tar –zxvf drupal-6.13.tar.gz” this will extract the files into a folder in your home directory

We need to make a directory in the web root folder to keep the Drupal files in. To do this type in “sudo mkdir /var/www/drupal”

We need to move the Drupal content over to the web folder. Type in “sudo mv drupal-6.13/* drupal-6.13/.htaccess /var/www/drupal”

We need to set up folders for media associated with the site to do this issue “sudo mkdir /var/www/drupal/sites/default/files” then “sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/drupal/sites/default/files

We need to copy and set the Drupal initial config file. To do this we first set copy the settings file by issuing “sudo cp /var/www/drupal/sites/default/default.settings.php /var/www/drupal/sites/default/settings.php” then we need to make sure this file is accessible by issuing the command “sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/drupal/sites/default/settings.php”

Next we need to make sure there is a database in MySQL that Drupal can use. Issue the command “mysqladmin –u root –p create drupal” at the prompt type in the MySQL password you added during the Ubuntu setup.

Drupal will also need the right to read and write data to the SQL database. Log into MySQL by typing “mysql –u root –p” followed by the MySQL password At the mysql> prompt type in “GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON drupal.* TO ‘drupaluser’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘drupalpass’; note this is important we do not want the root password for SQL being used all the time so the above command creates a Drupal user and Drupal password. Replace ‘drupaluser’ and ‘drupalpass’ with something else.

Next at the mysql> prompt type in “FLUSH PRIVILEGES;” then when executed type in “\q” to quit MySQL.

Now we need to restart Apache to make sure the settings take effect. Type in “sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart”

Do an “ifconfig” to get your IP address then head over to another computer on your network. Open up a web browser and type in the IP address from the server in the address bar e.g. 192.168.1.4, you will be presented with an “it works!” page which is apache telling you its server is up.

Next add a /drupal to the IP address in the address bar and you will be taken to the Drupal configuration page to set up the content management system and interface. If you see this congratulation you are nearly there.

Drupal now needs setting up, most of it is self explanatory but here are the steps:

1) Click on install Drupal in English

2) Type in the database name in this example it was called ‘Drupal’

3) Type in the username for the MySQL account for Drupal in this example it is ‘drupaluser’

4) Type in the password for the username in this example it is ‘drupalpass’

5) Enter in a site name I am calling my one ‘Intranet’

6) Site Email address is for whatever email address you want to associate with the site.

7) Type in an administrator name I will keep this straight forward and call it ‘Administrator’

8.) Choose and confirm the password for this user.

9) Choose the time zone you are located in.

10) Uncheck check for updates automatically. (I want it as it is then update it when I want to)

11) Save and continue

12) Then click on ‘your new site’

That is Drupal set up and ready to be customised and content added. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet on how to use Drupal’s features and how to add content. The site itself is quite self explanatory and you should be able to work yourself through it. You can also set up user accounts so you can control who logs in and who can do what according to what administration group they belong to. Any questions please get in touch my details are in the contact page.

Now we need a way to get files to and from the server in case we want to display any pictures or upload any documents. To do this we will need to install some sort of file transfer mechanism. But to be honest it will rarely be used.

Installing a FTP server

The FTP server of choice for me is VSFTPD but you could use any.

I would configure VSFTPD in the following way so only the local account on the server has FTP access which should be the administrator.

You can add other users to the local accounts on the server to allow other select people to upload files this is up to you. To set this up follow the following steps:

1) Type in the command in a shell prompt “sudo apt-get install vsftpd” and type Y when asked about additional disk space needed when installing.

2) Now it has installed we need to edit the configuration file. Type in “sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf”

3) Go through the file and change the settings to allow you the control you need to provide FTP access. I did the following for my configuration:

• a. Change ‘anonymous_enable=YES’ to ‘NO’ to disable anonymous login.
• b. Uncommented the line by removing # from the front of ‘write_enable=YES’ so we can write files to the FTP server.
• c. Uncomment the line ‘local_enable=YES’ to allow local system user accounts on the server to log into the FTP server.
• d. Uncomment the line ‘ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service’ and changed the wording after the ‘=’ to anything you want displayed when users connect. e. Press ctrl+x to exit and save changes made.

4) Restarted the FTP server so changes take effect by issuing “ sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart”

Now you can log on to the ftp server through a client like filezilla from anywhere on the internal network with the IP address of the new intranet server.

Last but not least you will want to administer the database associated with Drupal and perform backups etc. To help with this task I installed phpMyAdmin.

Installing phpMyAdmin

This add-on is a must with mySQL, it makes life so much easier. To install it open a shell prompt and type ” sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin” then type in your user password associated with your user account.

Follow the prompts when they come up, one will be to select the web server being used, the other will be to connect to the mySQL database, and then one for phpMyAdmin login.

Once installed you can access the user interface from the address http://serveripaddress/phpMyAdmin from any web browser on any computer on the internal network.

The End

And that is it, A complete intranet built and ready within 90 min using Ubuntu Server, Apache 2, PHP 5, mySQL 5, Drupal CMS, openSSH, VSFTPD, and phpMyAdmin. The rest of the configuration is down to you as it can be tweaked a lot.

Hope you all enjoy this post. Any comments please feel free to post them, if you would like any advice please get in touch; my contact details are available on the contact page or just email k_gohlar@hotmail.co.uk.

There are different vendors that supply virtualisation software for use in different operating systems or dedicated OS’s for the task like ESXi server by VMware.

I am going to talk about VMware Server 2 today and my experiences with it.

VMware Server 2 is available for Windows and Linux, I have a copy for both but I decided to install it in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS). My reasons for this were Linux is not as resource hungry as Windows is, and I find it has better system resource management which is needed to ensure the virtual machine runs well.

A side step to this post just to prove how well Ubuntu Linux works in terms of resource management I am going to install this on a P4 2.8ghz computer with only 1gb of ram and a 8mb graphics card. Ideally I should set up a Windows install as well on the same computer and do some performance metrics for an accurate analysis of resources but I just do not have the time at present, but may do so in the future. NOTE This will not make a suitable hardware environment when you want to start running multiple VM’s of different operating systems doing resource hungry tasks at the same time it will be ok to run 2 – 3 OS’s for demonstration and basic use.

The first thing I did was obtain my copy of VMware Server 2 from the VMware website http://www.vmware.com as we are installing this in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 32bit we will need to get the tar.gz version for the 32bit environment. If you are using a 64bit operating system make sure you download the right version.

I had to download some headers for Ubuntu so VMware can compile successfully during the install process. To do this open a console and type in “sudo aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential xinetd” followed by your user password.

Next I navigated to the location where the copy of VMware is, I put mine in /ktemp which was a folder I set up earlier.

Once in the location of the file I did a “ls” command just to make sure the file is there it should be named “VMware-server-(version_number)” where version_number is the version at the time of obtaining your copy. E.g. VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_32.tar.gz

Next the file will need unpacking so I issued the command “sudo tar zxvf VMware-server-(version_number).tar.gz” this will unpack the file into some folders.

I change directory to the distribution folder by typing “cd vmware-server-distrib”

Then I execute the installation command “sudo ./vmware-install.pl”

This started the installation process, and prompted questions on how you want to install and configure VMware Server 2. I just accepted the default values that appear in the square brackets []. To accept the default values just press enter all the way through the install process.

During the install process I was prompted for my serial number which I typed in. You have to type this in capital letters with the hyphens in the right place e.g. XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

Ubuntu does not have a root password as such so I had to create this. I did this by issuing the command “sudo passwd root” and then entered in the password I wanted for root.

I closed any open consoles or windows, and opened up my browser. (VMware Server unlike VMware Workstation has a web interface for its control) I went to the address and port http://127.0.0.1:8222 which loaded fine and asked if I wanted to allow this content which I did so I added the exception. (Note, if your system is on a network you will be able to access the VMware Server from any computer on the network through any web browser by typing in the address of the computer it is installed/hosted on, for example if the VMware Servers IP address was 192.168.0.1 you could just type in http://192.168.0.1:8222 from a different computer.)

After allowing access to the address from the browser and adding any exceptions, I was presented with a log in screen. The root login that I enabled earlier is the one I need to log in with, it will not allow access with any other account unless you configure/specify that account during the install process.

Once logged in I was presented with the control / administration panel. From here you can begin adding new virtual machines onto the server.

In this control panel you can add in additional data stores (hard drives, USB hard drives etc), Create virtual machines, and various other tasks. The interface is quite self explanatory. A nice feature I like is the summary page for the server stating how much of the resources are being used but it is not a live feed you will need to refresh the page to get up to date information.

I installed one Windows XP Pro operating system and did the windows updates to it, and one Ubuntu server 8.10 running mySQL, and Apache, as virtual machines. Both had 8 GB of hard drive space, for Windows I gave 200mb of ram, and Ubuntu server I gave 128mb of ram. Both of these virtual machines had no problems running at the same time.

I used bridged networking so an IP address is picked from the DHCP server on the internal network causing no communication problems between the VM’s and the host operating system or other computers on the internal network, which was proven by all being able to ping each other and all operating systems virtual or physical on the network being able to see my virtual Ubuntu server displaying the Apache “It Works” homepage when navigating to the IP address of the Ubuntu server.

Other networking options are available such as local and NAT and you can change to these at any time from the control panel.

Overall the installation went smoothly without any problems on the way, and I can happily administer my VMware Server from anywhere on my network.

Any questions regarding this please get in touch with me, my contact details are available on the contacts page.

What have your experiences been like with VMware Server 2?

I installed this distribution as a duel boot on my laptop which was very simple to do, I just booted into the live CD then clicked on the install to hard drive icon on the desktop followed the instructions and prompts, added a user name, password and computer name, at the partitioning section I used automatically partition and I just used the slider to decide on how much space I wanted to dedicated to Ubuntu from my Vista partition, the installation finished and I rebooted.

On boot up I was presented with the grub boot loader with Ubuntu selected as the default setting, booting into Ubuntu was quick and easy all of my devices were recognised apart from the graphics card. The software updates started immediately, Ubuntu automatically found the drivers for my nvidia graphics card which were not installed during install but all installed fine and after a reboot everything worked perfect.

This is a very usable operating system with all the software you need available for free.

For office tasks Open Office 3.0 is provided as standard with all the functionality you need to start work straight away with the ability to open and save Microsoft Office file extensions up to Office 2007. Also Open Office allows you to save your word processed documents in a PDF file format allowing for easy distribution of documentation in a professional file format.

For IM there is a program that I have been using for a while now in Windows called Pidgin which has been available for both Linux and Windows. It allows you to use most IM protocols in one package at the same time. I logged into my yahoo, msn, and googletalk accounts quickly and easily with no fuss.

Firefox 3.0.8 is included for web browsing, Evolution Mail and Calendar for your mail and appointment management, Brasero Disk Burner to write files to DVD or CD, Totem Movie Player 2.26.1 for DVD playback.

Access to all of your documents held on your Windows partition is easy, Ubuntu will mount your Windows partition and all you need to do is double click on your Windows partition and navigate your way through the folders to find your documents.

These are all the tools you need to get started using a computer straight away as a basic user. Other tools can easily be added with no fuss using the “apt-get” command at the command line, or by browsing the add remove programs section under the applications menu from the desktop.

If using the “apt-get” command make sure it is fully updated before you start as the package you are looking for may be in a new database.

To update the database type “sudo apt-get update” at the prompt just type in your Ubuntu login password.

Once updated you can install your application by typing “sudo apt-get install application_name” replacing application_name with the name of the application.

There are so many resources available for Ubuntu if you should ever get stuck, and if you cannot find the information you require someone in a forum will always be willing to help.

I use to use Red Hat, and the Fedora core distributions and still use Fedora including the new version 11 but this was mainly due to its support for all of my devices e.g. my wireless card in my laptop, I also use to find these distributions easy to use, but Ubuntu by far is the easiest Linux distribution to use and now that it supports my wireless card I will most likely stick with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu makes a great desktop for your day to day use and for the advance user who requires that little bit more functionality.

If you have any questions or require any help please get in touch via email. My contact information is available from the contact page.

Download a copy from http://www.ubuntu.com

Please provide information feedback regarding your experiences with Ubuntu 9.04