Setting Up A Primary Domain Controller PDC with Linux eBox

Setting up a Primary Domain Controller couldn't be easier! I was looking for a way to be able to have one logon with the same settings and shared files and folders. I thought that it would be fun to achieve this through a small domain controller that would allow me to log onto a domain vs. a local computer.

Now I could have done this with a windows server but I just don't had the money for that. Also you have to pay a hole lot more if you want anymore the like five clients.

So I researched and found a free open source alternative. It was called eBox, it goes by a different name now but I though eBox was easier to remember.

eBox is basically like a Windows server. Everything is wizard and GUI based. The cool thing is that it runs on a stripped down version of Ubuntu and it's all administered trough a web browser.

So I installed, on VMWare, and chose to set up and office environment server. This allowed mento run a mail server and a PDC server. It now works like a charm. (I hope to later post a how to guide on setting up an eBox server. Just subscribe to email updates in the top right hand margin to be notified of future posts!)

So if you need an easy to configure free alternative to Windows server I would highly recommend an eBox server.

Avast Causing Network Problems? Slow network transfers with large files.

I just reconfigured my data server because it was begging to become cluttered with old software. I also thought that it would fix my slow network transfer speeds. I am running a 100Mbps network so I shouldn't have to wait days to copy over a few gigabytes.

So after re-installing Windows on the server I installed all of the necesary software that the server usually runs, Orb, VMware Server, Zumocast, UltraVNC, etc. I also installed Avast.

I now wanted to copy some movies over to a shared network folder. I went to copy about 20GB worth of media. I was able to get about half way through the transfer and it just froze and hung there. I was very aggravated because I just wanted to copy some files over, nothing complicated.

I then realized that Avast has a network monitor, I was wondering if that caused my problem. I decided to uninstall Avast from the server and next thing you know it I didn't have any more problems with my network. Even though I still ran Avast on the client computer. My best guess was that the old server did not have the processor or RAM power that was necessary to scan large amount of network traffic. I now have AVG running on the server instead of Avast and it so far appears to be operating just as normal.

Set up a DNS (Domain Name System) Server on Ubuntu or Debian with BIND

I recently was attempting to set up my local network to have a DNS server on it. I didn't want to have to continue to memorize all of the IP addresses on my network. I have a server running multiple virtual machines with VMware server and within those virtual operating systems I have each one assigned to multiple IP addresses.

So simplify my network I wanted to have a DNS server set up so that I could simply type a name like "website.tld" into my browser and it would point to one of my local web servers.

So I went about searching for a good guide on the Internet and I finally found one on YouTube. In the video the man sets up the server on Ubuntu but I was able to use the same guide to set it all up on one of my virtual Debian machines.

So below are the four videos that basically teach you how to set up the entire thing from configuring the BIND DNS server to configuring Linux and Debian computers to use the new DNS server. (Note: I recommended you click the YouTube logo in the player to watch the videos on YouTube, they are sort of hard to read here.)

One thing I would like to add that I did myself in the house is that I added 8.8.8.8 as a secondary DNS to all of my computers just in case my DNS server went down I could still use Google's primary DNS. If your router supports this through DHCP you could also configure your router to have out the DNS information along with the IP addresses.