I just installed the latest Debian, and realized that the packages are not as up-to-date as I would like. For example I installed PHP and MySQL. PHP was at version 5.2.6 and MySQL was at version 5.0.15a. Considering PHP 5.2.11 and MySQL 5.1 are already released, made me think am I better off compiling from source?

After going down the compiling route, as in my previous post due to the same out dated problems I actually found a useful and up-to-date repository. Along with this, my bias towards Debian drastically strengthed. Which after many years of working on a a variety of other distro’s never quiet happened. Read the rest of this entry »

To install APC is usually straight forward:

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install apc

If your using nginx make sure you enter no to install using ASPX (apache dynamic modules).

Read the rest of this entry »

When I first looked at how old the nginx package in the debian repo was I thought that I should compile nginx. However, I eventually managed to find a more recent repo which I will post later.

Download nginx and install dependencies

Read the rest of this entry »

For people wanting to share content between two or more computers, try dropbox. I currently share files between Ubuntu and windows, and on occasions share documents with others. Dropbox easily caters for this, and best of all is free for up to 2GB.

Intalling dropbox on Ubuntuu 9.04

Read the rest of this entry »

After upgrading the kernel, booting into it left me with a black screen. The first time that I can honestly say ubuntu has shocked me. The problem is the nvidia 177 driver. To get around it, boot up into the previous kernal and install the Nvidia 180 packages. Once its done, reboot into the latest kernel version.

One of the key tools for ssh automation is keychain, which is pretty much available in most flavors of linux. Its usually not installed by default, therefore using your package manager install ‘keychain’

Ubuntu users:

$sudo apt-get install keychain

After its install, you set it up by entering the keychain command followed by your private key (not the public key).

$ keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa
KeyChain 2.6.6; http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/ Copyright 2002-2004
Gentoo Foundation; Distributed under the GPL</pre>
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh file...
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-csh file...
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-fish file...
* Starting ssh-agent
* Adding 1 ssh key(s)...
Enter passphrase for /home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa:
Identity added: /home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa)

Keychain then creates three files which correspond to various shell environments. As I am using bash, the file I will be referencing will be /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh.

$ source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh

To make sure everything is fine run the following to make sure the the environment is in fact set up:

$ env | grep SSH_A
SSH_AGENT_PID=9607
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-bMoLeb9606/agent.9606

Of course you will want this to happen automatically on login so add the following to your ~/.bashrc

keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa
source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh

The last step is to add the following line to your backup script (including the .)

. /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh

Backup Scripts
Ill only mention the two methods that i use.
1. scp: To copy files from one location to another
2. rsync: To sync a remote location to local location

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks the server logs, especially /var/log/messages seems to be filled with consistent ssh dictionary attacks. Of course this cannot continue, so what do you do to prevent it?

Well there are a few things:

Read the rest of this entry »

After googling the internet for hours I managed to get the perfect trac + svn setup. Because we use contractors at work, I needed a setup where the security is global but at the same time based on project by project basis. Therefore trac uses a global .htaccess and svn uses the authz file for authentication. At the moment this is working greate. To set up a new trac project is simply a case of creating the project, copying a base projects database and config file and then editing the new project’s config file.

We use a base project that is configured for all our core developers, which means im not adding the same permissions and groups all the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ubuntu 8.04 does not have sendmail installed by default. This was annoying when some of the php web apps that I created rely on sendmail to send out email notifications. But before going ahead and installing sendmail, I thought that I would try exim4. Installing on Ubuntu is very straight forward:

apt-get install exim4  exim4-config

Read the rest of this entry »

Installing an SSL certification in plesk, looked straight forward. But, there are a few gotchas.

When pasting in your certifacte, in the certificate field make sure you copy and paste the private key first. Followed by the certificate. If you puchased an AV certificate (so your domain is green in the IE bar), make sure you get the root and intermediate certificates.

Look in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf for the line like:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>

If it exists you have to delete/comment this default SSL virtual host starting from the
“<VirtualHost _default_:443>” line and ending with “</VirtualHost>“.

Then stop and start (not restart!) Apache server.

Read the rest of this entry »