I came across a real life-saver today…
All of my backup scripts are based on using RSYNC. This is because I am used to working between linux systems on which I always have root/sudo access and also have SSH. However I was recently tasked with a “fun” project that involved me needing to script the syncing of some directories between a linux server and a windows server running third-party SFTP software… that doesn’t allow SSH, SCP, etc. (more…)
Just got my dedicated box from WholesaleInternet.com – 16 Cores – 24 GB of RAM – 3 TB of Hard Drive space – 1 Gbps of bandwidth!
Why all that power? Simply put, I want to do virtualization and containers via Proxmox.
WholeSaleInternet offers ProxMox 3.1 out the gate – which is a bit outdated. It is running on Debian Wheezy and 4.1 runs on Debian Jessie. I wanted to get the latest and greatest running but it wasn’t a straightforward process… (more…)
So I wanted to start playing around with Docker and LXC containers and all kinds of other fun stuff on one of my cheap Kimsufi dedicated servers. I immediately ran into a problem though, Kimsufi (and parent company OVH, and probably sister company SoYouStart) use a modified Ubuntu Kernel. Why do they do this?
In short: optimization, speed, compatibility, control, etc. You can read a bit more about it here if you care to:
http://blog.infertux.com/2012/11/05/how-to-install-a-vanilla-debian-on-a-kimsufi/
That’s fine for 90% of what most people do, not so much for virtualization and quasi-virtualization type stuff like Docker and LXC containers.
I ran into a problem on the first step when I went to install the kernel extras package. It looked something like this: (more…)
One of the things I wanted to get from my OpenVPN Access Server was a usage report that would be emailed to me regularly. OpenVPN Access Server writes such logs to a file in /var/log on Ubuntu and Debian based systems. However it also writes a lot of other things. So I first started by examining the log. The key information I wanted was:
Date and Time of Successful Connections
Username
In my setup, OpenVPN connected users are put into a unique IP subnet and assigned an address by a DHCP server that is part of Access Server. All very easy to setup. In digging through the logs I found entries that are made whenever an IP address is assigned to a newly connected user.
An entry looked something like this: (more…)
I heartily recommend Exim4. I find it to be BY FAR the easiest/best email server for “send only” operations. It is a full MTA so you don’t need to rely on outside relays (gmail is commonly used with things like phpsendmail). Being a full MTA means that it can do a lot more but I haven’t ventured into using it for that and it is outside of the scope of this short article.
It should be noted that I am working on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server, however this will probably work on any debian variant of linux.
RHEL, Centos, Slackware, etc… go elsewhere.
So, if you need direct, send-only mail operations from your server, then here is a quick one liner for installing AND CONFIGURING Exim4: (more…)