Xfiles

Servers Will Be Down Tomorrow

Allan Chr — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:25:41 +0000

Unfortunatly my provider where I have my servers located has decided to move locations from 1 physical location to another. The servers will be shut down and moved tomorrow December 22 at aproximatly 17:00 hours.

The estimated downtime is set to 4 hours.

Just wanted to warn you in case you plan on using any of the guides in that timeframe.

Ubuntu Black Splash Screen Of Death Fix

Allan Chr — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:10:31 +0000

Last night I decided to reinstall my Old Dell X300 Laptop. It was ages since I had touched it and was only curious to see how it would run with Ubuntu 11.04.

Installing Ubuntu went like a charm as I expected. All hardware and every device was detected and everything played flawless now the X300 is quite old so there’s no change I would be able to run Unity which was fine by me.

Initial reboot went fine. Ubuntu confirmed what I already knew, that I would not be able to run Unity, and everything was nice and dandy in Ubuntu land up until the second reboot where I got…

Black Splash Screen Of Death

Now since the initial reboot went fine I was a bit confused what was going on here. I mean the installation had told me that I should set the environment to start up in classic mode. Which I had done before the second reboot.

Now I didn’t have any other OS on the X300 so I had no means on getting my hands on the system as such. I knew what I had to do though. I needed to disable acpi on the splash screen.

So I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu 11.04 and this time before I bootet the second time I adjusted the following.

As Root

sudo vi /etc/default/grub

Find the following line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Change it to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi=off splash"

And rebuilt grub

As Root

sudo update-grub

Installing NTP On FreeBSD

Allan Chr — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 10:04:39 +0000

Guide on how to install NTP on FreeBSD added. It’s is in the “FreeBSD Misc” Menu.

Now I normally don’t do request’s, but I had a few people asking for help on how to get the native NTP that comes installed with FreeBSD to work. And since It’s been rather long time since my last post and or guide "I’m sorry about that by the way, but I’m simply loaded with work at the moment". Today I had a few minuttes of spare time though and I figured it was as good a time as any to get a new guide up running and the topic was actually ok as well.

I newer really got the native NTP to work as intended on my own servers, so lately "”That would be since FreeBSd 7.x" I’m using an alternate method of getting NTP up running, which always seems to work flawlessly. So here it is.

Permalink: http://www.xfiles.dk/installing-ntp

MySQL Post-It’s

Allan Chr — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:53:02 +0000

MySQL Change Fulltext Length: In order to search for 2 characters when using MySQL you can tweak MySQL by adding the lines shown below to the my.cnf file. The standard length for fulltext search in MySQL is 4 characters.

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=2
[myisamchk]
ft_min_word_len=2

Changes are my.cnf doesn’t exist in that case you need to created it yourself. You can use the following approach.

As Root

vi /var/db/mysql/my.cnf

Add The Following Lines

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=2
[myisamchk]
ft_min_word_len=2

Remember to restart Mysql after that.

As Root

sh /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server restart

To check if the new values are used login to MySQL and perform the following query.

In MySQL

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'ft_min_word_len';

You should get an output like below.

Output

+ - - - - - - - - - - - - -+ - - - - - +
| Variable_name | Value |
+ - - - - - - - - - - - - -+ - - - - - +
| ft_min_word_len | 2 |
+ - - - - - - - - - - - - -+ - - - - - +
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

If ft_min_word_len is not set to 2 then you may need to repair your tables in order for them to use the new value. You can use the following command in MySQL to repair a table.

In MySQL

REPAIR TABLE QUICK;

Qmailadmin Guide Changes

Allan Chr — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:18:22 +0000

Qmailadmin guide upgraded to reflect Qmailadmin 2.1.15

This means that the bug in previous versions of Qmailadmin forcing to port downgrade in order to get John Simpson’s onchange patch to work has been fixed. And the part of the guide showing how to port downgrade Qmailadmin has been removed.

Qmail Post-It’s

Allan Chr — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:34:33 +0000

Qmail Change IP: When changing the IP address on your server besides changing the obvious files hosts and rc.conf you need to change the IP address in Qmail’s smtpd run file. If you used the guide on this site that is.

Change the IP address in the file below around line "40" to reflect the new IP address.

/var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run

BSD Post-It’s

Allan Chr — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 07:37:31 +0000

Grep With Color: While there are alternatives to grep able to highlight matches in color, most native grep’s actually has this option built in. If you want to try an alternative from the ports tree theres hgrep located in /usr/ports/textproc/hgrep. Hgrep has the functions / switches of grep and highlights matches without the need of a switch.

Native grep example highlighting the word “SPAM” in /var/log/maillog on FreeBSD.

grep --color=auto "SPAM" /var/log/maillog

Tail With Color: You can use alternatives like multitail located in /usr/ports/sysutils/multitail, or ccze located in /usr/ports/sysutils/ccze. But instead of relying on third party tools to do the job for you and not to mention learning a new tool in the first place, just combine tail with grep’s color highlighting abilities.

Native tail example combined with grep’s native color abilities tailing the word “SPAM” in /var/log/maillog on FreeBSD.

tail -F |grep --color=auto "SPAM" /var/log/maillog

Ntpd Status: You can check ntpd’s status by typing the following command. Now the output you get probably differs from the one below as it depends on where your are polling time from.

ntpq -p localhost

It will give you an output similar to the one below.

remote	refid	st	t	when	poll	reach	delay	offset	jitter
=====================================================================
+freesbee.wheel	212.243.86.159	2	u	986	1024	377	4.506	0.708	0.123
ntp.ngdc.net	217.198.219.102	2	u	995	1024	377	0.993	-1.658	0.191
*n1.taur.dk	.GPS.	1	u	26	1024	377	5.548	1.208	0.114
+zdani.szn.dk	192.36.133.17	2	u	31	1024	377	5.107	7.315	0.549

Grep For Two Words: The following command can be used to grep for two matching words in the same file. The syntax may differ depending on what *Nix you are using.

Example grep for “FAILED” And “REFUSED” with ignore case on in /var/log/xferlog on FreeBSD.

grep -i "refused\|failed" /var/log/xferlog

Installing Denyhosts On FreeBSD

Allan Chr — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:32:29 +0000

Guide on how to install Denyhosts on FreeBSD added.

The guide is in the “FreeBSD Guides” menu.

Permalink: http://www.xfiles.dk/installing-denyhosts

How To Block Referer Spam

Allan Chr — Sun, 15 May 2011 22:14:13 +0000

Guide on how to block referer spam with Apache added.

The guide is in the “FreeBSD Misc” menu.

Permalink: http://www.xfiles.dk/block-referer-spam/

How To Catch More Spam With Spamassassin

Allan Chr — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:56:40 +0000

Guide on how to catch more spam with Spamassassin added.

The guide is in the “Qmail Guides” menu.

Permalink: http://www.xfiles.dk/catching-more-spam-with-spamassassin/