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Category Archives: Server Administration
How use crontab / cron with Jailkit on Ubuntu 12
Recently I began testing jailkit on Ubuntu 12 and 12.04 and wanted users to have access to cron and crontab I read a lot of the documentation for man cron and have a pretty good understanding of how Vixie Cron works. There is a bit of a conflict with permissions of Cron and Jailkit. Jailkit wants most everything inside the jail (most often /home/jail/) to be owned by root and in the root group, and basically nothing to be writable by the jailed users (except for /home/jail/tmp/ and the users home directories in /home/jail/home/*) Cron, on the other hand, doesn’t want you to edit the crontab files for the users directly. They live in /var/spool/cron/crontabs cron searches its spool area (/var/spool/cron/crontabs) for crontab files (which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd); crontabs found are loaded into memory. Note that crontabs in this directory should not be accessed directly – the crontab command should be used to access and update them. More information is given from man crontab: There is one file for each user’s crontab under the /var/spool/cron/crontabs directory. Users are not allowed to edit the files under that directory directly to ensure that only users allowed by the system to run periodic tasks can add them, and only syntactically correct crontabs will be written there. This is enforced by having the directory writable only by the crontab group and configuring crontab command with the setgid bid set for that specific group. That’s great, but… How do I set up … Continue reading
RabbitMQ: users disappear / settings gone after reboot / restart
If you are using RabbitMQ on am Amazon EC2 instance and your node settings and users seem to disappear on reboot, it may be because of how the RabbitMQ server works. Settings, users, vhosts, and the rest of the RabbitMQ are all bound based on the node name – or the hostname. You can check by running either hostname or hostname -f for the FQDN. You will also notice that RabbitMQ stores settings in: /var/lib/rabbitmq/ And more specifically in: /var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia If you check the contents you will see something like: drwxr-xr-x 5 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 27 14:55 rabbit@ip-10-110-58-254/ drwxr-xr-x 2 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 27 14:55 rabbit@ip-10-110-58-254-plugins-expand/ drwxr-xr-x 5 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 25 15:08 rabbit@ip-10-21-004-149/ drwxr-xr-x 2 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 25 14:41 rabbit@ip-10-21-004-149-plugins-expand/ drwxr-xr-x 5 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 23 04:48 rabbit@ip-10-21-043-37/ -rw-r–r– 1 rabbitmq rabbitmq 5 Feb 23 04:41 rabbit@ip-10-21-043-37.pid drwxr-xr-x 2 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 23 04:41 rabbit@ip-10-21-043-37-plugins-expand/ drwxr-xr-x 4 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 18 17:31 rabbit@ip-10-21-05-95/ drwxr-xr-x 2 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 18 17:28 rabbit@ip-10-21-05-95-plugins-expand/ drwxr-xr-x 4 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 26 15:32 rabbit@ip-10-21-037-208/ drwxr-xr-x 2 rabbitmq rabbitmq 4096 Feb 26 15:26 rabbit@ip-10-21-037-208-plugins-expand/ Why do RabbitMQ settings disappear on restart? Well, if you “stop” an amazon ec2 instance and then “start” it, it will have a new IP address unless you are using static IP addresses. Note that this doesn’t happen on “reboots” – just “stop” and “start” for EBS / (Elastic Block Storage) volumes. If you are not using an EBS volume then … Continue reading
Posted in Linux, Server Administration
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Google Apps Free – Signup
You don’t even need a credit card to try Google Apps. It’s free for up to 10 users – just fill out this quick form to create your account. Have bigger business needs? Get Google Apps for Business Enter the domain name you would like to use with Google Apps A domain name is your online business identity or online brand. It can be used to host your organization’s website (e.g. www.your_company.com) or email address (e.g. your_name@your_company.com). That was the way you used to be able to sign up for Google Apps for Free. It lived at the address: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/new3 Unfortunately, as of 12/7/2012 Google Apps is No Longer Free. Here is what the signup screen used to look like:
Posted in Marketing, Server Administration, Tech Tips
Tagged free, google, google-apps
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Uncaught exception ‘CFCredentials_Exception’ with message ‘No credentials were provided. [solved]
![Uncaught exception 'CFCredentials_Exception' with message 'No credentials were provided. [solved]](http://techblog.willshouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/uncaught-exception-cfcredentials_exception-with-message-no-credentials-were-provided-solved.jpg "Uncaught exception 'CFCredentials_Exception' with message 'No credentials were provided. [solved]")
If you’re using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK (Software Developer Kit) version 1.5 “Allegro” for PHP you may have noticed an error like: Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘CFCredentials_Exception’ with message ‘No credentials were provided. The SDK attempts to retrieve Instance Profile credentials from the EC2 Instance Metadata Service, but doing this requires the “default_cache_config” option to be set in the config.inc.php file or constructor. In order to cache the retrieved credentials.’ in #0 amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/sdk.class.php:439 Stack trace: amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/services/ec2.class.php(155): CFRuntime->__construct(Array) #1 amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/_samples/cli-ec2_sorting_and_filtering.php(59): AmazonEC2->__construct() #2 {main} thrown in amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/sdk.class.php on line 439 My solution was fairly simple – the PHP SDK download has a config-sample.inc.php file that you can copy to config.inc.php and then add your AWS key and secret key. After doing that you should be good to go.
Posted in Server Administration, Software, Tech Tips, Web Development
Tagged amazon, error, php, sdk
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Scale On-Demand and Reduce your Backup and File Share Costs with AWS Storage Gateway
Dear Amazon Web Services Customer, Find out more about how you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to reduce the cost of your departmental backup and file share storage by joining our Dec 5, 10am PST webinar. During the webinar, we’ll discuss how you can easily deploy our recently launched Gateway-Cached volumes feature to reliably back up your on-premises data to Amazon S3. We’ll also discuss how you can seamlessly store your corporate file shares on Amazon S3, minimizing the need to scale your storage on-premises, while retaining low-latency access to your frequently accessed files. After the presentation, we will be answering questions from the audience. Register here for the webinar. Time: 10:00-11:00 AM PST Date: Wednesday, December 5, 2012 Sincerely, The AWS Storage Gateway Team
Posted in Marketing, Server Administration, Tech Tips, Web Development
Tagged amazon, ec2
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Outlook – 451 Temporary local problem – please try later [solved]
![Outlook - 451 Temporary local problem - please try later [solved]](http://techblog.willshouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/outlook-451-temporary-local-problem-please-try-later-solved.jpg "Outlook - 451 Temporary local problem - please try later [solved]")
Recently while using Bluehost with Microsoft Outlook 2007 and trying to send / receive mail, I got an error 451 – “Temporary local problem” Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC6A) : ‘Your outgoing (SMTP) e-mail server has reported an internal error. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP). The server responded: 451 Temporary local problem – please try later’. The solution to this problem is related to the DNS records in the Bluehost control panel. I had changed the MX records to point to Google Apps and had not changed them bac. To get around this error with Bluehost (and maybe other hosting providers too) make sure that you highest priority MX record (lower numbers are higher priority) points to something like mail.yourdomain.com This will also ensure that all e-mail sent to your domain is handled by Bluehost (take note of that in case you’re trying to use that and google apps).
Jeff Bezos to speak at “AWS re: Invent”
We are excited to announce that Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon has been added to the AWS re: Invent agenda in Las Vegas, November 27-29. Jeff will keynote the conference alongside Andy Jassy, Sr. VP of AWS and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. Register today to hear these visionary technology leaders speak at AWS’s inaugural customer and partner conference. In addition to these keynotes, AWS re:Invent will feature 150 sessions delivered by the engineering teams behind the AWS Cloud and customers from around the world such as Netflix, NASA JPL, McGraw Hill, Robert Half International, Thomson Reuters, Nokia Siemens, Intuit, Pinterest, SocialCam, SmugMug, TinyCo, and more.
Posted in Linux, Marketing, Server Administration, Web Development
Tagged amazon, conference
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icns mime type: image/icns
Here are the mime types for a few popular image format including the ICNS image/icon file. If you’re wondering what you need to set the mime type as, as I was, then I believe you’ll be pleased to learn that the standard mime type should be set as image/icns. If you have thoughts otherwise leave me a comment below. Here’s the table: ##### # Image file formats ##### *.png = image/png *.jpg = image/jpeg *.gif = image/gif *.tif = image/tiff *.bmp = image/bmp *.icns = image/icns
10 Cloud Backup Services
Barracuda Networks End-to-end protection https://www.barracudanetworks.com/ Druva www.druva.com/endpoint-cloud-backup Amazon S3 Justcloud.com zipcloud myPCBackup.com SOS Online backup SugarSync livedrive mozy dropbox box carbonite
Posted in Linux, Server Administration, Web Development
Tagged amazon, backup, cloud
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WordPress: Convert All Tables To Utf8
Are your WordPress MySQL Tables of mixed charsets? The ideal or standard character set is utf-8 as it supports multiple languages and special characters – so people from all over the world can post comments, register, and interact with your blog without having characters from their name, languages, etc converted into weird or strange symbols. I read the WordPress article on Converrting your Tables but wasn’t so sure which direction to go. The article states: In most cases if a collation is not defined MySQL will assume the default collation for the CHARSET which is specified. For UTF8 the default is utf8generalci, which is usually the right choice. After a little research I got it working. The following code is from the supplemental code page from that article and I found that the code below (second code block on that page) worked well for WordPress 3.4.1 I would not recommend using the bash script at the bottom of that page because while it converts the tables it doesn’t convert the fields. When connecting from the command line you may need to specify –protocol=TCP if you get an error like ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (2) But again, I would not really recommend that script, because while it will run, it will basically only run the following commands: ALTER TABLE wp_commentmeta CHARACTER SET utf8; ALTER TABLE wp_comments CHARACTER SET utf8; ALTER TABLE wp_links CHARACTER SET utf8; ALTER TABLE wp_options CHARACTER SET utf8; ALTER TABLE … Continue reading
