A client of mine today wanted to be able to shut down their linux server if their UPS goes off line and reaches low battery. They currently have the CyberPower 1500 AVR UPS, which states that 2008 will have linux support. After googlin’ around a bit I came across this project, Network UPS Tools or… Continue reading Use NUT to watch your UPS

This is a great tip a friend gave me the other day. The elog summary is great to get some of the warning messages and instructions, but you can have those email to you, and get more information! This is extremely simple.. and can really save some time debugging a emerge. Simply add this to… Continue reading Get portage emails from your system

You ever want to see what your server is doing on boot up, but it’s a remote server? You can log the boot messages to a file. I’m a little late to come across this, but it’s still a mighty cool tip. First you need to emerge showconsole. emerge -v showconsole Next, we need to… Continue reading Log your boot messages

The last two days have been maddening for me. On two servers, out of the blue, MySQL is freakin’ and freakin’ hard. It all started with corrupted tables, to memory preformance issues. I then jacked up some mem values, and now both servers are crashing. I think I might be dealing with two problems (second… Continue reading MySQL Problems! – RED ALERT

Hello All I now have RSS feed subscriptions available. Get site updates via your RSS reader of choice to see what pain in the ass problem I’m currently dealing with. Just click the the ‘readers’ widget to the right, or click this link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/uno-code

So if you’ve haven’t been following what I’ve been working on.. I’ve been working on a OpenVPN system on a Gentoo Linux firewall where remote users can connect and access files, but have the ability to authenticate against PAM as well as shared keys (dual layer authentication). Most of the how-to documentation out there talk… Continue reading OpenVPN – Masquerade Iptable Issues

Currently, my original ‘how-to’ on getting OpenVPN running with OpenVPN-GUI used the standard key based authentication. You can configure your client to password protect your connection, but I wasn’t comfortable with that scheme. If a laptop is stolen, it would be possible (and not hard to bypass this password). Now, we can add a additional… Continue reading OpenVPN with dual layer authentication (keys and pam)

According to this thread I started, the ‘unusably short session_id provided‘ issue I discussed earlier is related to a bug in openssl-0.9.8f. I’ve added 0.9.8g to package.keywords and I’m currently doing some testing. For those that don’t know how to do this, simply add this to your /etc/portage/package.keywords: =dev-libs/openssl-0.9.8g ~x86 and re-emerge openssl. You might… Continue reading Unusably short session_id provided – bug in openssl-0.9.8f

So the Pam upgrade wasn’t too bad. I updated one box, restarted services, and rebooted to ensure that everything is working correctly. All you really need to do is update some of the files in pam.d. cd /etc/pam.d grep pam_stack.so * When I did this, I also saw rexec, rlogin and rsh. I basically looked… Continue reading Pam upgrade procedure (1 box down.. more to go)

Hmmm, greated this morning with a pam upgrade. The einfo message looked somewhat hairy: >> Merging sys-libs/pam-0.99.8.1-r1 to / * * Your current setup is using the pam_stack module. * This module is deprecated and no more supported, and since version * 0.99 is no more installed, nor provided by any other package. * The… Continue reading Linux-PAM 0.99 upgrade