Weblogs for ajt
#135
Posted by ajt on Fri 20 Jun 2008 at 18:48
Today someone asked me to fix a proxy server for another site at work that wasn't working. The member of staff that should look after the boxes at that site having left the company a few weeks ago and so far they have not been able to replace him.
My colleague left me in front of his notebook logged on as root via PuTTY to some remove Unix/Linux system. A quick ps aux | grep squid showed that Squid wasn't running (I did know that Squid was used already), /etc/init.d/squid start started it up - and ps confirmed it still wasn't running.
I then had a look in the /var/log/ directory tree for a Squid log, and then tail showed that there wasn't able to write to it's log filesystem that Squid wanted to write too, df confirmed the filesystem was full. It's not my box and there just wasn't space to dump 11 GiB of Squid logs any where so rm got rid of the oldest ones (several months old) and then Squid started okay.
The whole process was done in less than 2 minutes, I didn't know which OS it was (though it turned out to be Debian Sarge) and I know sod all about Squid other than it's a proxy server. Interestingly the network guy who asked me to fix it said it took me less time to fix the server than it would have taken him to start the Windows GUI on the Windows ISA servers at our site...
#134
Posted by ajt on Tue 27 May 2008 at 10:47
On Saturday we moved into our new home. If we were "animals" the RSPCA would do someone for cruelty. We knew the place was small, but you don't realise how stupidly small a place is until you try and put your stuff in it.
It's a modern mid '80s house, so the build quality is atrocious. When you walk on the first floor near the walls you can feel the walls move/creak. None of the doors are square with the walls or ceiling. The light sockets are on the wrong side of the doors, so you can't turn any lights on or off without closing the door. The conservatory leaks... The list goes on and on.
Thankfully we are only renting the place, it's not worth the GBP200k or USD400k that it was on the market for only a few months ago. Once prices have adjusted, (about 50% down) I'll buy something, just not this one.
We still don't have a telephone line and hence no ADSL service, so no Internet at home, which is a pain as it makes sorting out things like the utilities hard as they all want to do business over only the Internet if you want the best deal.
It's a modern mid '80s house, so the build quality is atrocious. When you walk on the first floor near the walls you can feel the walls move/creak. None of the doors are square with the walls or ceiling. The light sockets are on the wrong side of the doors, so you can't turn any lights on or off without closing the door. The conservatory leaks... The list goes on and on.
Thankfully we are only renting the place, it's not worth the GBP200k or USD400k that it was on the market for only a few months ago. Once prices have adjusted, (about 50% down) I'll buy something, just not this one.
We still don't have a telephone line and hence no ADSL service, so no Internet at home, which is a pain as it makes sorting out things like the utilities hard as they all want to do business over only the Internet if you want the best deal.
#133
Posted by ajt on Tue 20 May 2008 at 09:38
At the very last minute we found a new home to rent, and it's even in the village we currently live in. We move in on Saturday. I'll be off line for a while as the ADSL service takes a few days to re-provision.
Things are still stressful but less so, which is better.
Things are still stressful but less so, which is better.
#132
Posted by ajt on Fri 9 May 2008 at 21:02
The Dovecot SSL certificate expired on my Dovecot POP3s server and needed refreshing.
It was the end to a long drawn out and painful week.
* Works is sh*t at the moment
* Landlord is evicting us and we have to find somewhere else to rent
** House prices are tumbling, so I refuse buy at the moment
** Estate agents are lazy, greedy and useless
** Moving is a pain however you look at it
* ADSL service at home is cr*p at the moment
* I'm depressed and miserable
It was the end to a long drawn out and painful week.
* Works is sh*t at the moment
* Landlord is evicting us and we have to find somewhere else to rent
** House prices are tumbling, so I refuse buy at the moment
** Estate agents are lazy, greedy and useless
** Moving is a pain however you look at it
* ADSL service at home is cr*p at the moment
* I'm depressed and miserable
#131
Posted by ajt on Mon 21 Apr 2008 at 14:39
I'm tired and stressed.
I need to find a new home to rent in a hurry and while house prices are tumbling in the UK at the moment, rents are not...
The wind, rain and bird song last night kept me awake.
Yesterday my email inbox was flooded with backscatter email from idiots.
Today's test of a new SAP application/interface isn't working, partially because I'm late, but also our external partner changed their SSH server without telling me!
Work is pure stress - we have a lot of the "Dead Sea" effect going on...
I need a holiday...!
I need to find a new home to rent in a hurry and while house prices are tumbling in the UK at the moment, rents are not...
The wind, rain and bird song last night kept me awake.
Yesterday my email inbox was flooded with backscatter email from idiots.
Today's test of a new SAP application/interface isn't working, partially because I'm late, but also our external partner changed their SSH server without telling me!
Work is pure stress - we have a lot of the "Dead Sea" effect going on...
I need a holiday...!
#130
Posted by ajt on Sun 6 Apr 2008 at 12:47
I've now got my new home server running on Debian Lenny. I replaces my very old an very underpowered Sarge box. While I accept that Lenny is currently in testing and clearly isn't up to the standard of a stable release yet, there are quite a few things missing from Lenny that you would think by now would be in place...
Xen is not available yet, all the admin side stuff is in there, but there is no stock Xen host kernel yet - which is a bit of a pain as I had planned on using Xen on the new server. Instead I'm running kqemu and VirtualBox-ose instead which seem to work perfectly well, both working through the fake frame-buffer "Xvfb".
On my desktop system, also Lenny, nvidia drivers are not an option so I'm using the horribly sluggish xorg nv drivers. For most purposes it's okay, but I've had to disable my screen saver since switching from nvidia drivers to nv as the screen saver causes X to crash...
On the plus side I've managed to get NFSv4 working without kerberos support, it's actually dead easy to do and much faster than NVFv3 I think. Getting a kerberosised NFSv4 is proving more awkward...
Xen is not available yet, all the admin side stuff is in there, but there is no stock Xen host kernel yet - which is a bit of a pain as I had planned on using Xen on the new server. Instead I'm running kqemu and VirtualBox-ose instead which seem to work perfectly well, both working through the fake frame-buffer "Xvfb".
On my desktop system, also Lenny, nvidia drivers are not an option so I'm using the horribly sluggish xorg nv drivers. For most purposes it's okay, but I've had to disable my screen saver since switching from nvidia drivers to nv as the screen saver causes X to crash...
On the plus side I've managed to get NFSv4 working without kerberos support, it's actually dead easy to do and much faster than NVFv3 I think. Getting a kerberosised NFSv4 is proving more awkward...
#129
Posted by ajt on Tue 1 Apr 2008 at 21:13
Today I thought I'd give Xen a go on my AMD64/Lenny box. The snag is that while most of Xen 3.2 appears to be available there isn't a stock Debian Linux-Xen kernel available - or I'm miss reading how it all works.
Additionally my broken finger still hurts and and typing is a real pain...
Additionally my broken finger still hurts and and typing is a real pain...
[0 Comments
| Add Comment
|
]
]
#128
Posted by ajt on Tue 25 Mar 2008 at 09:45
At the weekend I started to set my new server up at home.
I thought I'd give NFSv4 a try, it seems to be the "new thing". So far it seems to work okay, better than the NFS3 user-space server of the Sarge era.
What I need to do next is getting Kerberos support running... It's all behind a firewall/router so I don't need security per se, but it's fun to learn how it's done.
I thought I'd give NFSv4 a try, it seems to be the "new thing". So far it seems to work okay, better than the NFS3 user-space server of the Sarge era.
What I need to do next is getting Kerberos support running... It's all behind a firewall/router so I don't need security per se, but it's fun to learn how it's done.
#127
Posted by ajt on Fri 14 Mar 2008 at 20:07
In a VirtualBox VM I tried to install Debian Lenny on a system using LVM2 mirroring to see if I could get it to work.
Before I got to the partition drives option I switched to a shell and fdisked the two virtual drives and set them up as software raid for the boot partition and the rest of the drives as LVM containers. I then did a modprobe for the device mapper, a pvcreate, a vgcreate and two lvcreates with mirror option. In theory the LVM system should manage mirroring of the logical volumes it created. I did a varyon, then I laid down ext3 filesystems and mkswap and was even able to mount/umount them okay.
Back in the DI installer I then tried to use my new filesystems that had been created. The installer detected the filesystem layout and was happy to let me choose the mount mounts for boot, root and nominate the swap partition. I hit continue and I briefly saw some error message before it threw me back at the partition stage. I couldn't find the error message on any of the virtual consoles, or I'd had Googled for it.
Looks like I'll have to stick with the traditional software mirror first before applying the LVM on top.
Before I got to the partition drives option I switched to a shell and fdisked the two virtual drives and set them up as software raid for the boot partition and the rest of the drives as LVM containers. I then did a modprobe for the device mapper, a pvcreate, a vgcreate and two lvcreates with mirror option. In theory the LVM system should manage mirroring of the logical volumes it created. I did a varyon, then I laid down ext3 filesystems and mkswap and was even able to mount/umount them okay.
Back in the DI installer I then tried to use my new filesystems that had been created. The installer detected the filesystem layout and was happy to let me choose the mount mounts for boot, root and nominate the swap partition. I hit continue and I briefly saw some error message before it threw me back at the partition stage. I couldn't find the error message on any of the virtual consoles, or I'd had Googled for it.
Looks like I'll have to stick with the traditional software mirror first before applying the LVM on top.
[0 Comments
| Add Comment
|
]
]
#126
Posted by ajt on Mon 10 Mar 2008 at 14:31
At the end of last week my new home server arrived (one day late). It's a basic AMD64-X2 based unit from Digital Networks UK. I could have got a cheaper box from other people, but I wanted a box with a three year warranty, from a UK based firm and from someone openly supporting Linux.
It came running Debian Etch. I'm going to reinstall from scratch as I don't like the current disk layout. I'll create drive 1 as a half of a RAID mirror and drive 2 as the other half. I'll put a simple /boot on the first mirrored partition, and then install GRUB on both disks. The remaining mirror will then end up as the base for the LVM, from where everything else will run.
I'll probably create a basic 10Gig root partition, on the LVM, the question thereafter is if I go down the path of some form of visualisation tool (KVM/Xen/Qemu/VirtualBox etc etc)? and if so which service goes into which VM.
Externally accessible services:
* SSH server
Internally accessible services:
* DNS/DHCP Server
* Apache2 web server (development and testing purposes)
* dappd server (Firefly)
* Dovecot IMAPd server + Fetchmail from external sources
* CVS then what ever that gets migrated into (Subversion, Git ..?)
* NFS Server (to allow work on the Apache content and read/write audio files)
Putting the SSH server in it's own VM is the most obvious solution, it's not really making it that much more secure, but it's logical and I can see how to do it.
The other services are muddied, I'd need to have some form of centralised user admin to ensure that my UID is the same on all the boxes so I can modify files that are served by a given server process.
Learning to set up a server environment VM, a deployment/maintenance system and learning LDAP would be interesting, but it's a lot of effort for a home system.
It came running Debian Etch. I'm going to reinstall from scratch as I don't like the current disk layout. I'll create drive 1 as a half of a RAID mirror and drive 2 as the other half. I'll put a simple /boot on the first mirrored partition, and then install GRUB on both disks. The remaining mirror will then end up as the base for the LVM, from where everything else will run.
I'll probably create a basic 10Gig root partition, on the LVM, the question thereafter is if I go down the path of some form of visualisation tool (KVM/Xen/Qemu/VirtualBox etc etc)? and if so which service goes into which VM.
Externally accessible services:
* SSH server
Internally accessible services:
* DNS/DHCP Server
* Apache2 web server (development and testing purposes)
* dappd server (Firefly)
* Dovecot IMAPd server + Fetchmail from external sources
* CVS then what ever that gets migrated into (Subversion, Git ..?)
* NFS Server (to allow work on the Apache content and read/write audio files)
Putting the SSH server in it's own VM is the most obvious solution, it's not really making it that much more secure, but it's logical and I can see how to do it.
The other services are muddied, I'd need to have some form of centralised user admin to ensure that my UID is the same on all the boxes so I can modify files that are served by a given server process.
Learning to set up a server environment VM, a deployment/maintenance system and learning LDAP would be interesting, but it's a lot of effort for a home system.