Wouldn't it be useful if your computer could email you? I'd like to be notified by email when my server is in trouble, but I don't want to run my own mail server. sSMTP is perfect for this; it's a simple way to send email from your system to an SMTP mail server, like Gmail's.

If you need a quick web server running and you don't want to mess with setting up apache or something similar, then Python can help. Python comes with a simple builtin HTTP server. With the help of this little HTTP server you can turn any directory in your system into your web server directory. The only thing you need to have installed is Python.

When you start doing it though, you soon find out that the hardest, or at least lest documented task, is not how to send email, or how to block spam. It is how to make sure that the email you send is always accepted by other sites, that is how to find out if your email server looks like a spam source.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Lenny server with munin and monit.

Everyone is not as lucky as having a full fletched email client like thunderbird or kmail to send mails. There is one unlucky group known as system administrators who have to send the mails either through the command line or a script running on the remote server.

If you're running a web application with user registration, you may need to have users or administrators receive email from the application. When you just need to send outgoing email and don't need to receive, it&'s easy to set up Postfix to do this for you. You can even set the "from" header so that replies will go to your own email account. This how-to was tested on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server.

A cool idea for a small client/server post of load data viewable from a Web browser. Allows you to keep an eye on your server loads from any location and can easily be tailored to add whatever data you like. Its admittedly a rough hack, though the concept may be of use for other projects.

How many times has this happened to you: you want to access a remote server, but you can't because it is behind a firewall? I frequently found myself in such a situation when I needed to access my Internet-connected server running Linux, so I thought of a system where I could start controlling my server remotely via a simple email.

Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over networks and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries and generates performance data for reporting. It is a fork of Nagios. This tutorial explains how to install Icinga on an Ubuntu 11.10 server to monitor this server and another Ubuntu 11.10 server.