administration

Recently I ordered a server with Debian etch. Unfortunately during testing I noticed that startx was on the system, along with a whole slew of other junk that I don’t generally want on a fresh server. I wanted to remove all of the cruft but I didn’t have the exact package list. (more…)

Im not a big fan of cpanel but I do manage a server that runs it. Recently some update was pushed down that caused about 50% of my users to not be able to access mail. It all boiled down to a permission issue that the cpanel scripts /scripts/mailperm did not take care of. Their scripts do not correct the permissions of the virtual user maildirs. (more…)

If you use multiwan with pfsense and like me you have issues making outbound ftp connections try disabling the userland FTP-Proxy application on the LAN interface. It may stop you from being able to do active ftp connections but at least you can use ftp. With it enabled I was unable to make any outbound ftp connections active or passive.

Had some planned maintenance on one of our servers this weekend. After bringing the server back up I forgot to start searchd for sphinx. Don’t want that to happen again so I wrote a quick init script for searchd. (more…)

System performance analytics seems to be a frequent question on forums and mailing lists. Finding out why something is slow is generally nontrivial as there are many factors to consider. I have found the sysstat package to be an invaluable tool when looking at system performance. Specifically the command sar gives a wealth of information. (more…)

Text processing is fun. Well, fun if you like to beat your head against a wall. Most of the time I just string a few things together to get whatever I am doing done. Its much better to find the shortest way to do something, it spawns less processes, is more efficient and generally a good idea. So if you have ever wanted to match a string from some given output and only print the preceding line here you go. (more…)

So as I previously said I have updated to Hardy Haron and along with it comes a new kernel that does not work out of the box with vmware. You need to patch your vmnet and vmmon sources to get it working again. So I went ahead and wrote a script to make the process a bit faster. (more…)

After some lovely feedback from Sotiris Tsimbonis on my last post Find and delete old files in linux I have a better (faster) way to delete files. (more…)

I have a few of those directories that files tend to pile up in. I don’t need the files but I also don’t take the time to delete them. Pruning these old files is a good thing to keep your used disk space under control as well as your sanity. Find is a great tool to do this, its extremely flexible I recommend you read the man page next time your bored. (more…)

Ok so this is the opposite of what I generally use but its been annoying me and I just figured out what was causing it so I figured I would share it. I am currently running Kubuntu Hardy Haron but this problem was present when I installed my first Ubuntu varient Gutsy Gibbon. (more…)