Open a terminal windows and execute:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rcconf

(Chances are you may already have the rcconf installed.)

sudo rcconf

Scroll down the list of services till you find the service labelled “Ondemand”, this is the service that controls the CPU scaling. Unselect the option and hit Ok to exit, now when you reboot your system should run at full speed all the time.

VM Setup In Virtual Box

To have a bit of a play first up I set up a virtual machine using VirtualBox with 2099MB Ram and a 25GB hard drive.

Lucid Lynx has apparently made alot of positive changes to the installation process, unfortunately though by force of habit I had down loaded the “alternate” install image.

Installing the system….

Having used the alternate install disc the install process was pretty uneventful and took a little over 40 minutes to complete. Although this would of probably been a bit quicker had I been installing the operating system on a physical machine rather than a virtual one.

The new release has a new look boot screen, pretty plain and I am not a fan of the purple background but that is not where the major improvements lay. A lot of changes have been made to Lucid Lynx in order to speed things up. Timing the boot process from bios to login screen on my VM gave 19.48 seconds, I also had a a virtual machine running Karmic Koala to time which gave 40.03 second, which is an improvement of over 51%!

After booting we are brought to the login screen, its only marginally different to the Karmic Koala login. Personally I think it doesn’t look as sharp in this release due to the theme having less contrast.

After logging in we are greeted by the new look theme named “Ambience”, the old brown colour scheme is gone and replaced by purple. Ubuntu 10.04 also comes with another new theme named “Radiance” which is basically just a light coloured version of the Ambience theme.

The administration menu is almost identical to 9.10 the only thing striking me as being slightly different is rename “USB Startup Creator” to just plain old “Startup Disk Creator”.

The preference menu like the administration menu is almost unchanged, except for new entries labelled “Messaging & VoIP Apllications”, “Ubuntu One” and “Broadcast Preferences”.

The places menu is unchanged.

Installing the additions for Virtual Box, as you can see in the image the minimize / maximize / close button up the top of application windows have moved from the right side to the left.

The software manager has under gone a very welcome make over, with software categories being further categorised  into sub categories. This makes life a lot easier when your looking for a particular application in one of the more populated categories. A new root category has also been added called fonts that covers all your typeface needs.

Like all the Ubuntu releases before it proprietary codecs etc are not installed with the base install due to licensing, copyright and patent issues that go against the Ubuntu Free Software Philosophy.

Rythm Box now contains a tab for the Ubuntu One Music Store, this is a new addition. The range at the moment is somewhat limited at present when compared to something like iTunes, and the appearance rather bland but nevertheless  a great feature which will only get better as it matures.

A lot of work has also been done on improving Ubuntu’s handling of the iPhone and iPod touch, music can even be played in Rhythm Box from the device. Unfortunately though you cannot write music to the device so we are still stuck using that abomination iTunes to sync content for the time being.

The new version of Gnome integrates social network into the desktop itself, just configure your account details and you can be tweeting or updating your facebook status directly from the desktop.

Lucid Lynx also brings inbuilt integration with the Ubuntu One cloud storage. Like the very popular Dropbox service this allows users 2Gb of storage space for free in the cloud  to store and share files etc.

Overall I was very impressed with the latest Ubuntu release very polished and some great new features, over the next few days after backing up my data I will definitely be upgrading my Desktop.

This article will walk you through the process of setting up a PowerDNS server with a replicated MySQL back end on two Ubuntu 9.10 systems.

Step 1 – Configuring the Master Nameserver

This nameserver is going to be your primary server, any changes that need to be made to the DNS records are made on this server and they will be replicated on the the slave. To get started log into your primary name server via SSH and execute:

apt-get update
apt-get install apt-get install pdns-server pdns-backend-mysql mysql-server

When prompted by the installer create a password for the MySQL root user and then configure the MySQL service itself:

pico /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Go down to line 53, it should look like the line below comment it out.

bind-address = 127.0.0.1 <- becomes -> # bind-address = 127.0.0.1

This is needed so the slave server can talk to the master and be aware of any changes made to its records. Save the file, then restart the MySQL service to make your changes active.

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Okay now its time to sort out the database side of things by creating a MySQL user for PowerDNS to use and the database for the storage of its DNS records:

mysql -u root -p

Whilst in the MySQL client execute the following commands:

CREATE DATABASE dns_server;

GRANT ALL ON dns_server.* TO ‘pdns’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘pdns_pass’;

NOTE: Be sure to change the password for the pdns user to something a tad stronger.

GRANT ALL ON dns_server.* TO ‘pdns’@'localhost.localdomain’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘pdns_pass’;

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

USE dns_server;

CREATE TABLE domains (
id INT auto_increment,
name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
master VARCHAR(128) DEFAULT NULL,
last_check INT DEFAULT NULL,
type VARCHAR(6) NOT NULL,
notified_serial INT DEFAULT NULL,
account VARCHAR(40) DEFAULT NULL,
primary key (id)
);

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX name_index ON domains(name);

CREATE TABLE records (
id INT auto_increment,
domain_id INT DEFAULT NULL,
name VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
type VARCHAR(6) DEFAULT NULL,
content VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL,
ttl INT DEFAULT NULL,
prio INT DEFAULT NULL,
change_date INT DEFAULT NULL,
primary key(id)
);

CREATE INDEX rec_name_index ON records(name);
CREATE INDEX nametype_index ON records(name,type);
CREATE INDEX domain_id ON records(domain_id);

CREATE TABLE supermasters (
ip VARCHAR(25) NOT NULL,
nameserver VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
account VARCHAR(40) DEFAULT NULL
);

Then exit the MySQL client with the command:

exit;

Alternatively if you don’t feel that comfortable using the command line MySQL client you could install phpmyadmin and use that to create the database and user within web based environment.

Now that the database has been setup we need to configure PowerDNS to use our newly created MySQL database and user for any lookups it needs to make.

pico /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf

Go down to line 82 or thereabouts and find the line:

# launch=

Uncomment this line and modify so that it reads:

launch=gmysql

Edit the file /etc/powerdns/pdns.d/pdns.local

:

pico  /etc/powerdns/pdns.d/pdns.local

Add the following lines so that PowerDNS can connect with the MySQL service.

gmysql-host=127.0.0.1
gmysql-user=pdns
gmysql-password=pdns_pass
gmysql-dbname=dns_server

Save the file and its show time, just restart the PowerDNS service for your changes to take effect and the DNS side of your server should be good to go!

/etc/init.d/pdns restart

Step 2 – Setting up PowerAdmin

Okay its working but not very useful at the present, as it has no DNS records to serve. So lets install PowerAdmin so we can manage our DNS records using a web based interface. I am assuming the server you are working on already has Apache2, PHP and its modules installed already. If this is not the case you will need to install these before continuing as they are required for the operation PowerAdmin.

PowerAdmin also requires the mdb2 module to work properly, which i doubt many people will have installed already. So:

apt-get install php-mdb2-driver-mysql

Or on some older versions of Ubuntu it wont be in the repository so make sure you have PEAR installed and

apt-get install php-pear
pear install MDB2-2.5.0b2
pear install MDB2_Driver_mysql-1.5.0b2

Then continue the poweradmin install with:

cd /tmp
wget https://www.poweradmin.org/download/poweradmin-2.1.3.tgz
tar zxvf poweradmin-2.1.3.tgz
mv poweradmin-2.1.3 /var/www/poweradmin
cd /var/www/poweradmin

Now the code base is in place open your browser and point it at the Poweradmin location to continue the install process e.g http://ns1.mydomain.com/poweradmin/install

Follow the install instructions and when you reach step 6 of the install process copy the PHP code displayed on screen, go back to your terminal window create the file:

pico /var/www/poweradmin/inc/config.inc.php

Then paste the code from the browser window into the new file and save.

NOTE: The browser gives you the code with white space between some of the lines make sure these have been removed before saving the file. Otherwise after logging in you will be greeted by a “Warning: Cannot modify header information” PHP error.

Step 7 is the last step of the install process and simply asks you to delete the install directory. If you fail to complete this step, the program will not let you login!

rm -rf /var/www/poweradmin/install

The operation of PowerAdmin is pretty straight forward although if you have only used Bind in the past you may find some of the terms a little confusing. A quick look at the PowerDNS documentation should point you in the right direction though.

Step 3 – Replicating Changes on the Slave Server

Log in to the server you will be using as your MySQL slave. Update the repositories and then install the MySQL server application:

apt-get update
apt-get install mysql-server

On your master server edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file go down to around line 92. Uncomment and modify the lines that regard replication so they resemble:

server-id = 1
log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log
expire_logs_days = 10
max_binlog_size = 100M
binlog_do_db = dns_server

Save your changes to the file and then open up the MySQL client to create a new user for the replication process:

CREATE USER ‘replication_user’@'192.168.0.2′ IDENTIFIED BY ‘mypassword’;

GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON * . * TO ‘replication_user’@'192.168.0.2′ IDENTIFIED BY ‘mypassword’;

NOTE: replace the IP address ‘192′.168.0.2‘ with the IP of your slave server, and change the password to something a bit stronger than ‘mypassword‘

Now edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file of your slave server and append the following lines after the [mysqld] declaration so that the slave can connect to its master:

server-id=2
master-host = 192.168.0.1
master-user = replication_user
master-password = mypassword
master-port = 3306

Be sure to change the ip address of the master server and the users password to match your setup. Save the file and restart the MySQL service on both the Master and Slave nodes so that your changes will take effect.

On the slave now use the mysql command line tool and execute the following commands:

start slave;
show slave status\G;

You you should see something like:

*************************** 1. row ***************************
Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
Master_Host: 192.168.0.1
Master_User: replication_user
Master_Port: 3306
Connect_Retry: 60
Master_Log_File: mysqld-bin.000001
Read_Master_Log_Pos: 98
Relay_Log_File: mysqld-relay-bin.000002
Relay_Log_Pos: 236
Relay_Master_Log_File: mysqld-bin.000001
Slave_IO_Running: Yes
Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
Replicate_Do_DB:
Replicate_Ignore_DB:
Replicate_Do_Table:
Replicate_Ignore_Table:
Replicate_Wild_Do_Table:
Replicate_Wild_Ignore_Table:
Last_Errno: 0
Last_Error:
Skip_Counter: 0
Exec_Master_Log_Pos: 98
Relay_Log_Space: 236
Until_Condition: None
Until_Log_File:
Until_Log_Pos: 0
Master_SSL_Allowed: No
Master_SSL_CA_File:
Master_SSL_CA_Path:
Master_SSL_Cert:
Master_SSL_Cipher:
Master_SSL_Key:
Seconds_Behind_Master: 0
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Now test it by creating a record on the master and with any luck you will also be able to see it on the slave. That said i stuffed around a bit when setting mine up and the slave service wouldn’t start as it was looking for the wrong bin file on the master. I was able to follow these instructions though to point the slave in the right direction to get it working again.