Posts tagged debian

Adding swap while the server is online with Debian and VMWare ESX

0
July 7, 2010
by Kura in , , ,

Recently I had to install Oracle on a virtual machine but didn't find out until after I'd spun up of the machine that Oracle required at least 2GB of swap space, my machine did not have enough.

Thankfully it's quite simple to increase swap space, using VMWare ESX, simple add a new drive to the machine as you normally would, I used 5GB.

Detecting the new SCSI drive and partioning it

This bit is simple, I'm going to assume you're logged in as root.

echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan && fdisk -l

If host0 doesn't work, try changing to host1, host2 etc.

Now we need to format the drive, More >

Building nginx on Red Hat and Debian to RPM/DEB-style locations

0
April 2, 2010
by Kura in , , ,

The title of this post is a bit stupid, but I honestly couldn't think of any other way to write it...

When compiling nginx by hand, by default make install will push the binaries out to /usr/local/nginx and it doesn't come with a start/stop script, understandably because it doesn't know which OS it is going to be installed on etc etc.

Recently I was tasked with building nginx to an old Red Hat Enterprise Live 4 server with no yum installation, no nginx package in up2date and not being able to find an RPM that's link wasn't dead.

I've always felt that, being a Debian user, people think of me More >

Configuring Nagios to monitor remote load, disk, swap etc using NRPE

9
March 21, 2010
by Kura in , , ,

I'll assume you already have Nagios installed and configured and have an understanding of actually configuring and using Nagios.

Remote server -- the server to be monitored

First we'll install the needed plugins and daemon on the remote server.

apt-get install nagios-plugins nagios-nrpe-server

Once installed, open up /etc/nagios/nrpe_local.cfg

And place the following in it

allowed_hosts=NAGIOS.SERVER.IP,127.0.0.1

command[check_users]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_users -w 5 -c 10 command[check_load]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_load -w 15,10,5 -c More >

HOWTO: SSH config on Debian/Ubuntu

1
February 18, 2010
by Kura in , , ,

Today I finally got round to setting up my local user ssh config on my new work laptop and figured I'd do a quick write up on it and it's uses.

You can create a configuration file in your home directory that will override the options set in your machine-wide config.

Your configuration files

Your local config can be found/created in:

~/.ssh/config

And your machine-wide configuration is in:

/etc/ssh/ssh_config

Rather than editing my ssh config across my whole machine I'm doing it for my local user specifically.

Reading the man page for ssh_config will give you a full list of available options, More >

HOWTO: Guest Virtual Machine disk extend online with Debian/Ubuntu, LVM2 and VMWare ESX

12
February 16, 2010
by Kura in , , ,

Over the last two days I've had the interesting task of online some VMs from clones and increasing their disk space to accommodate a mass of user uploaded content. I've done this before but never actually with an Logical Volume Management (LVM) disk.

My first approach, like a fool, was to clone the VM from source and boot it from a remotely mounted GParted ISO, this didn't actually go as expected and I was unable to add it to the LVM, I found a nice guide online and consulted a colleague because I knew he'd done something similar recently. After the first successful size increase I realised I More >

More nginx proxy_cache optimizations and nginx load balancing

4
February 14, 2010
by Kura in , , , ,

This is yet another follow up to post to several previous posts about using nginx as a reverse proxy with caching. It is actually a direct addition to my post from a week or so ago which outlined how to actually using nginx's proxy caching feature which can be read here -- http://syslog.tv/2010/02/07/nginx-proxy_cache-and-explained-benchmarked/.

Even more changes?

Yes, even more changes, these are basic changes that are there to improve the caching capabilities and also implement load balancing.

Cache changes

The first set of changes are in the main nginx configuration More >

HOWTO: DomainKeys with Postfix on Debian/Ubuntu

6
February 12, 2010
by Kura in , , , ,

I have written a much newer, clearer and better article on DomainKeys signing email here. <

About

This guide is a sister to another guide I wrote a while back about how to use DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) with Postfix on Debian, which can be read here - http://syslog.tv/2010/01/11/dkim-on-debian-with-postfix/.

DomainKeys is an older implementation than DKIM, DKIM is a merge of DomainKeys and Identified Mail. Both DomainKeys and DKIM are used so having both configured is a good idea.

Getting started

Lets start off by installing the dk-filter

sudo su; apt-get install dk-filter

Once More >

HOWTO: IPTables on Debian/Ubuntu

1
February 11, 2010
by Kura in , ,
Installation

Simple, if it's not installed already then run the following commands

sudo su

apt-get update && apt-get install iptables

/etc/init.d/iptables start

The safest and best way of configuring iptables, in my opinion, is to have two files. The first is a temporary/test set that you will save to first, the second is the actual rule set that will be loaded to iptables.

Configuration

So, first we'll create an empty temp rules file

touch /etc/iptables.temp.rules

Add some simple rules to it

*filter

# Allows all loopback traffic and drop all traffic to 127/8 that doesn't use lo -A INPUT -i More >

nginx, proxy_cache and reverse proxying explained & benchmarked

3
February 7, 2010
by Kura in , , , , ,
The beginning

Where to begin? nginx would be a good start I suppose. It's far easier and makes much for sense for you to actually read about nginx from it's own website - http://nginx.org/en/ - but just to give a simple explanation too; `nginx is king of static content HTTP servers.`

Anyone that has dealt with Apache on medium to high traffic websites will know that Apache is bit of a `wheezy, old geezer` when it comes to content serving using it's mpm-worker (threaded). Very often high traffic will cause server load to go through the roof but for serving dynamic content, there really is no More >

Coming soon… Ubuntu + Nagios2 + Server clusters

0
February 3, 2010
by Kura in , , ,

Well, title says it all really, an Ubuntu howto for Nagios2, the monster of all monitoring software. Watch this space.

Go to Top