Homepage: http://www.boutell.com/gd/

GD "is a graphics library for fast image creation on the fly", that is images that can be created at request by your Linux machine, this enables you to expand the possibilities of your webserver to produce graphical displays when needed.

At the time of the how-to, the latest version was gd 1.8.3. And the source code file gd-1.8.3.tar.gz was used. To install the GD into your system just follow these simple steps:

1. Firstly you will need to uncompress the source code you have downloaded from the GD website. To do this you will need to be in the directory where you downloaded the above mentioned file to. Then you just have to type this tar -xzvf gd-1.8.3.tar.gz to uncompress the files.

2. Now you must edit the Makefile so that the correct directory for the headers files are available for the compiler. Change to the newly created directory by typing cd gd-1.8.3/ and edit the Makefile with you favourite editor, here we used pico, pico Makefile. You will need to find the two or so references to /usr/local/include and change them to the appropriate header include directory for your setup, in our case the new path was /usr/include. This should be all the changes you need to make, but if you need to make anymore, make them now.

3. All the necessary adjustments have now been made, so its time to compile the application. To do this you must firstly make the program by typing make, and then make install (it may be necessary to have root permissions to do this install).

Now that you have successfully installed the graphics library you must wait a while for the changes to take affect before you can use them. For us it took about 10 minutes or so.

Homepage: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/

This program "is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser."

This allows you to have detailed statistical information about who is accessing your web server, what pages are hit the most and the amount of traffic your site has daily/monthly/yearly. For an example of speed, my 3 month log file of approximately 15,000 hits and more information was processed in less that 1 second.

The only downside to this analyzer is that it must be run manually, but you can install a service command that will run it daily etc. as you will see below.

The latest file at the time of this pages creation is webalizer-2.01-06-src.tar.Z and can be downloaded from the above detailed site. To install this program you must have the GD Graphics Library installed (see above instructions if you need to install it). To install this program just following these instructions.

1. To start with you must uncompress the downloaded source code by tar -xzvf webalizer-2.01-06-src.tar.Z, this will create the appropriate directory and extract all the files.

2. Now you must setup and install the script, go to the created directory by typing cd webalizer-2.01-06 and the you must type in the following to compile and install it:

./configure
make
make install

3. With all luck Webalizer has been setup successfully and you will now need to create the configuration file to run the program. The easiest way is to modify the sample configuration file that is supplied with the program source, this sample is the following file: /etc/webalizer.conf.sample, all you need to do is edit it and change anything you want to customize it to your needs. Once you are happy with your modifications then save the file to /etc/webalizer.conf and now your almost done.

4. You must create a directory for the output html files to be created in, this must be a folder that is accessible on your webserver for yourself and others to view, its must also be the same folder that is listed in the above configuration file.

Since the program has been installed and the configuration file has been created your ready to run it for the first time. To run the program all you need to do is type ./webalizer in the directory you installed the program. This should display any error messages or with any luck just tell you all the processing details that means its working correctly.

Now you can go to the directory on your site (website) and check out your log file stats.

To make the Webalizer run daily, all you need to do is create a script in the /etc/cron.daily/ directory, if you want it done hourly then you make a script in the /etc/cron.hourly and so on, this will allow the system to run it when required and save you the effort of running it manually. The script should look a little something like this:

#!/bin/sh
# Webalizer Service Script
# Coded by Mayhem (C)2000

/<install-dir>/webalizer-2.01-06/webalizer > /dev/null

Homepage: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

"VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures."

It is a great way to manage your Linux machine if it doesn't have its own monitor. To use this program just follow these few simple instructions.

1. Download the file vnc-3.3.3r2_x86_linux_2.0.tar.z from the above homepage and then you can continue with the next step.

2. Once the file is on your system extract it in the usual manner (tar -xzvf vnc-3.3.3r2_x86_linux_2.0.tar.z) this will create a directory called vnc_x86_linux_2.0 in your installation directory.

3. Change into the newly created directory by typing cd vnc_x86_linux_2.0, and once in there is is a good idea to read the latest readme file by typing cat README | more. To install the X server version you need to type in the following which will copy the appropriate files:

cp vncviewer vncserver vncpasswd vncconnect Xvnc /usr/local/bin

4. To run the server you will need to type vncserver, it will prompt you for a password to protect the VNC server, once you have verified the password the server will be initialized and ready. Make sure you note the port that the program is running on, its should be something like <your_hostname>:1.

5. To connect to your newly server setup you will need to download the file vnc-3.3.3r7_x86_win32.zip, and run your zip program to extract the files, once you have extracted the files into a suitable directory you want to either install the program or just run the Viewer which is the file vncviewer.exe. Once you have run the viewer you will need enter the IP address of your server and the port the program is running on, e.g. 203.164.*.*:1, and then enter the password.

You should now be able to have a graphical interaction with your server from another machine on your network, and if necessary from any computer connected to the Internet.

Well I finally got around to completing the Beta 1 version of my Server Uptime v2.0 Script. (Will be doing Beta 2 very soon, when I get the time, fixes will inlcude better support for different browers, and display fixes)

This uptime script allows you to place a link anywhere on your site and once clicked it will display a pop-up window with one of four supplied background images and some specs of your box along with the current uptime of the machine.

Here is a features list:
- Graphical Display
- Window Pop-Up Format
- Server Independent Code
- Distribution Information (Red Hat only)
- Auto-Refresh Option
- Cycle option for backgrounds
- Many more features to come ....

All the installation instructions are provided in the supplied README file (they are provided in the usual format like this site and should be quite straight forward to follow). Here are the instructions on how to extract all the files.

tar -xzvf serveruptime-2.0b1.tar.gz
cd uptime2/

PLEASE NOTE: This is a BETA test version for you to evaluate and tell me what you think and so I can get feedback on it. Please email me any feedback to mayhem (at) linuxathome.net, questions or anything in relation to this script. For License information please read this GNU-PL document.

You can download the script for here. If you would like my v1.0 script or my script for SHTML then pleas email me a request to mayhem (at) linuxathome.net