During my server disaster earlier mentioned, I decided to monitor the drives a bit more closely. The drives on the system were SMART capable, so I emerge’d sys-apps/smartmontools. Here is the description of that package: sys-apps/smartmontools Available versions: 5.36-r1 5.37 ~5.37-r1 5.38 {minimal static} Installed versions: 5.38(10:56:28 10/09/08)(-minimal -static) Homepage: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ Description: control and monitor… Continue reading Monitoring S.M.A.R.T devices

Wow. Where to begin? Last week I had a crazy sequence of events related to one of my servers. After seeing a series of segfaults and memory errors, I started seeing corrupted files on the disk. This particular server is housed at a dedicated hosting facility. Their first look at the hardware they noticed that… Continue reading Server Collapse

Today, I encountered some weird issues with a postfix/amavis mail server which was causing segfaults and memory paging errors. I was forced to bounce the server, but it wasn’t able to shutdown all of it’s services. That left me with the only option of calling the dedicated hosting company and requesting a hard shutdown. Shortly… Continue reading Policyd-weight issues with unclean shutdown

Today we needed to get some logging in place for a router and switch at a client’s office. This is a dreaded Windows only network, so I needed to find some options for a syslog server that would be able to run on Windows 2003 platform. Of course in the Window’s world, I’m always amazed… Continue reading Kiwi Syslog Server for Windows

Okay, I’ve been dealing with this problem FOREVER. On one box, my syslog-ng server, logrotate consumes 100% CPU for several hours, but will eventually finish. For this whole time, I’ve been thinking it’s a bad logrotate script, but I’ve never been able to isolate it. My recent attempt to isolate the problem, I used strace… Continue reading Logrotate lockup causing 100% CPU usage

On only two boxes I manage, I had problems updating net-snmp to net-snmp-5.4.2.1. During the compile I would receive the following failure message: chmod 755 ../blib/arch/auto/NetSNMP/TrapReceiver/TrapReceiver.so cp TrapReceiver.bs ../blib/arch/auto/NetSNMP/TrapReceiver/TrapReceiver.bs chmod 644 ../blib/arch/auto/NetSNMP/TrapReceiver/TrapReceiver.bs Manifying ../blib/man3/NetSNMP::TrapReceiver.3pm make[2]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/work/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/perl/TrapReceiver' make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/work/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/perl' Traceback (most recent call last): File "setup.py", line 2, in <module> from setuptools… Continue reading Issues with net-snmp update on some boxes

Over the years, I’ve set up multiple firewalls and fileservers for clients and my own office. What I require is a server platform that is Gentoo Linux friendly with quality components and at an affordable price. Early on, I was a big fan of the Dell PowerEdge 400SC. I remember picking those up (without operating… Continue reading Dell PowerEdge SC Servers – great deals for linux servers

I wanted to tighten up my FTP service. Currently, I use and love vsftpd. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it does not support SFTP protocol, but it does support TLS/SSL handling. You will need to ensure that the vstpd has been compiled with ssl support. Here are my current USE flags for vsftpd: net-ftp/vsftpd-2.0.6… Continue reading Configuring VSFTPD for secure connections (TLS/SSL)

Starting Nov 8, I’ve been seeing fairly consistent segfaults from amavisd. I’m unable to determine what is causing it. Below is a listing of occurances in /var/log/messages. The server has been running fine (normal load – mail traffic is normal). Also I checked uptime (reboot was Nov.1) and recent emerges. The only emerges close Nov.8… Continue reading Amavisd-new starting to segfault?

Earlier this year, I was receiving logs stating that dansguardian could not connect to IPC socket. I just recently upgraded dansguardian (2.10-r1) and finally found the problem. I originally posted this issue in February on the Gentoo forums and didn’t receive any response. Today, I found the problem and the fix. Below is an example… Continue reading Dansguardian – Error connecting via ipc to log [SOLVED]