debian

General posts that involve the Debian operating system. This’ll range from configuration, installing programs, and much more

Mount Amazon S3 bucket locally on Debian 5 & 6/Ubuntu 10.04

0
March 3, 2012
by Kura in , ,

I've recently been toying with my Raspberry Pi mirror including moving it out on to Amazon's S3. I've written an article on how to back up to S3 here, but that isn't enough when it comes to serving data from S3.

I needed the ability to RSYNC data from the official Raspberry Pi servers on to mine and then in to S3 and for that I used s3fs and FUSE.

FUSE

You can actually do this successfully without requiring FUSE, just by installing the s3fs binary on to your system, but this only allows the user who mounted to access the mounted bucket and also is not possible via /etc/fstab.

FUSE allows you More >

Backup a Linux server to Amazon S3 on Debian 6/Ubuntu 10.04

0
February 29, 2012
by Kura in , ,

I have several servers powering syslog including it's Raspberry Pi mirror, load balancer and email servers. All of my servers are hosted using Linode in their London data centre and have Linode's back-up system doing both daily and weekly snapshots.

For the app and database servers I do server-side backups storing each website and it's database in it's own folder within /backup in case I require a quick back-up to fix something, rather than the server has died.

This is all well and good but I like having an off-site backup too and for that I use S3...

S3

Amazon's S3 is pretty cheap and very More >

Automatic/Unattended updates on Debian 6 (Squeeze)

2
January 28, 2012
by Kura in ,

All commands prefixed with a # need to be run as sudo or root

The unattended-upgrades package used on Debian is based on the one from Ubuntu. It is generally pretty safe in my opinion but I only ever enable it for security upgrades.

Installation

# apt-get install unattended-upgrades apticron

unattended-upgrades handles the actual updates, apticron is used for emailing you of available updates - it is not required but I like it.

Configuring unattended-upgrades

Open up /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades and change it to the content below.

APT::Periodic::Enable More >

Running your own PGP keyserver with SKS on Debian 6/Ubuntu 10.04

0
December 17, 2011
by Kura in , ,

Commands prefixed with # need to be run as a sudo or root.

Installation

To install we need to run the following command:

# apt-get install -y sks

Now we build the key database:

# sks build

And change the permissions for the sks user:

# chown -R debian-sks:debian-sks /var/lib/sks/DB

Next we need to make sks start from init, open up /etc/default/sks in your favourite editor and initstart to look like below:

initstart=yes

Now we can start the service with:

# /etc/init.d/sks start

Your keyserver will now be up and running on port 11371.

Web interface

We'll need to create a web folder within sks More >

Rebooting on OOM

2
October 25, 2011
by Kura in , ,

I would generally not advise using this unless you have skill at debugging why OOM has spawned and also debugging kernel panics after they happen, from logs.

It is possible to configure your kernel to panic when OOM is spawned, which in itself is not useful but, coupled with a kernel option for auto-rebooting a system when the kernel panics it can be a very useful tool.

Think before implementing this and use at your own risk, I take zero responsibility for you using this.

sysctl vm.panic_on_oom=1

sysctl kernel.panic=X # X is the amount of seconds to wait before rebooting

DO NOT FORGET TO More >

Nagios3 + MK Livestatus + xinetd on Debian 6/Ubuntu

0
October 13, 2011
by Kura in , , , ,
Preparation

First we need to make sure we have all the stuff we need to compile mk livestatus and run it

apt-get install make build-essential xinetd ucspi-unix

MK Livestatus

Grab the mk livestatus source from here, currently it's version 1.1.10p3 but update the commands below to match your version.

wget http://mathias-kettner.de/download/mk-livestatus-1.1.10p3.tar.gz

tar -xvzf mk-livestatus-1.1.10p3.tar.gz

cd mk-livestatus-1.1.10p3

./configure

make && make install

Xinetd

Now that it's compiled we need to write a xinetd config for it, create a new file called /etc/xinetd.d/livestatus and put More >

Load balancing HTTP/HTTPS with Pound on Debian 6/Ubuntu

0
September 29, 2011
by Kura in , , ,

Pound is a great little load balancer, it's fast, opensource and supports SSL termination, which is great!

Install

apt-get install pound

Configuration

The default configuration should be pretty good for most purposes, but feel free to tweak as you require.

HTTP

We'll first look at load balancing HTTP, in case you don't want or need HTTPS load balancing.

We'll need delete all the content within ListenHTTP  block, once done it should look like this

ListenHTTP

End

Now we add an address and port to listen on and finally a line to remove an HTTP header

ListenHTTP

Address 0.0.0.0 # all More >

Postfix spam protection with greylisting using Postgrey on Debian 6/Ubuntu

4
September 24, 2011
by Kura in , , ,

A simple yet effective method for protecting your mail server from spam is to use greylisting. In simple terms, when an email is received the server will temporarily reject it with a 450 response code claiming that the server is busy, the sending server should then attempt to try to deliver at a later point in time, if enough time has passed the recipient server will then accept the incoming mail and whitelist the send address for a period of time.

This is effective because most spam servers are configured not to retry the send whereas real mail servers generally will retry. This sadly does More >

SpamAssassin + Razor + Pyzor on Debian 6/Ubuntu

4
September 22, 2011
by Kura in , , , ,

This is part 4 of my series on configuring a mail server, please see part one, part two and part three if you're not familiar with them.

The content of this article was written to work with the previous three articles but should work on any SpamAssassin set-up.

Razor

First off we need to install Razor.

apt-get install razor

Now we need to run three commands to register and configure Razor.

razor-admin -home=/etc/spamassassin/.razor -register razor-admin -home=/etc/spamassassin/.razor -create razor-admin -home=/etc/spamassassin/.razor -discover

These 3 commands should be pretty self More >

Debian/Ubuntu upgrade security packages only – a better way to do it

0
September 21, 2011
by Kura in , ,

I have created a scripts that handle these tasks for you, available here.

First thing we need to do is create an sources list specifically for security.

sudo grep "-security" /etc/apt/sources.list | sudo grep -v "#" > /etc/apt/security.sources.list

Now that this is done we can simply continue to use the command below to trigger security-only upgrades

sudo apt-get upgrade -o Dir::Etc::SourceList=/etc/apt/security.sources.list

Note

This will work until you upgrade your distro (e.g. 10.04 -> 12.04), at which point you will need to re-run the first command to regenerate the security.sources.list More >

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