eBox platform provides a mini-debian installation along with its modules to allow you to provide and manage network services on your corporate network. The key capabilities includes support for multiple external network interfaces with load balancing, traffic shaping, transparent proxy, firewall, content filters, DNS (domain name server), NTP (time server), mail server, Jabber Instant Messaging server, SAMBA for file sharing, DHCP and more. In short it promise to be a one-stop solution for all network services needs for small businesses. Particularly I was interested in load balancing between multiple ADSL providers and traffic shaping capabilities. Here are my experiences with eBox platform.

Working with replication systems is not easy. Learning and testing different kind of MySQL replications and fine-tuning it to your specific needs is a time-consuming endeavor. Also you need to have several MySQL servers at your disposal. To overcome these limitations, Stardata created a MySQL 5 Replication Playground, a painless installation of 4 replicating nodes in one server, using MySQL 5.

Try: mysql -e status|grep 'Server version' If that doesn't work then use: mysql -u root -p -e status|grep 'Server version' Provide root password when prompted. Default root password for MySQL is empty string, so just pressing enter when prompted for password will suffice by default.