DeckerD: Drew's Personal Corner of the Web » Sys Admin

Compiling Duplicity on CentOS 5.x

Drew — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:22:55 +0000

Duplicity, an encrypted backup utility that uses the rsync algorithm, is becoming quite useful for my day to day backups. I've written several backup scripts using rsync, gzip, and other useful backup schemes. Heck, I've even written my own backup subroutines that create a backup structure based of the current date. So, trust me, I usually never change my ways, unless it's something that really intrigues me. Some Background Information I'm still testing some stuff out, however, I'm Read More »

Splunk Free: .htaccess Protection using Apache

Drew — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:29:06 +0000

You ever hear of Splunk? Splunk enables you to search and navigate all your logs and IT data in real time; logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts and metrics. It's an awesome tool to make it easier to monitor and watch your log files. Unfortunately, Splunk is expensive. How expensive? Try $5000 a year, for the cheapest license. Here's the main problem; the free version of Splunk does not come with any user authentication, not even Admin authentication. This means that Read More »

Clearing (but not deleting) log files

Drew — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:22:26 +0000

Sometimes, as a Systems Administrator, or SysAdmin, there are times we need to clear out the log files, without actually deleting them. As a smart Sys Admin, you normally wouldn't need to do this, but as I am currently involved in supporting customers and their Linux machines, I run into some pretty neat stuff (neat as in special). I've had a few issues where someone actually runs out of disk space on / (root filesystem) due to the /var/log directory being full. First off, you might run the Read More »

Curing ‘Symbolic link not allowed’ (Apache 2.0)

Drew — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 20:19:39 +0000

Awhile back when trying to add a directory to Apache on my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server, I ran into some issues. These issues, of course were the infamous 403 "Forbidden" error that your web barfs up when you try to access a server that is not publicly viewable, because of permission issues. I'm going to give you my scenario and explain how you can fix this issue, so that you don't have to go through an hour of throwing your hands up in disgust. The Scenario In our example, out DocumentRoot Read More »

VMWare: “Failed to create named-pipe directory” error

Drew — Wed, 30 May 2007 08:09:31 +0000

Have you ever received the Failed to create named-pipe directory error message via the vmware-mui error log files, and not able to access the VMWare Management Interface? If so, here's the fix. The error message at hand is the following: /var/log/vmware-mui/error_log ModVmdb load: Address of ModVmdb_InitCore: 0xb7c745a0 Failed to create named-pipe directory: /var/run/vmware//httpd/3854: No such file or directory VMWARE PANIC: \nNOT_IMPLEMENTED F(4023):707 Panic: Could not Read More »

Stepping Into Samba

Drew — Tue, 01 May 2007 23:38:07 +0000

A few friends of mine stare at me blankly when I mention Samba and SMB. In fact, sometimes they think it's the same thing, when in fact, it's not. I'll talk about the differences between the two and walk you through setting up Samba networked shares. This will give you a nice introduction to Samba and also Linux, if you are not familiar with that, also. The real question here isn't why SMB, or why Samba for that matter? Well, first off, after I explain to you what SMB is and then Read More »

/bin/rm: Argument list too long

Drew — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 02:47:45 +0000

While at work, I had a customer ask me how to, one time, delete all the mail in his /home//mail/cur directory. So, first off, I wanted him to just take a look at that directory, get to know it (figuratively speaking). So I had him run the du command on it; wow, you wouldn't imaging how much mail was in there! The actual command I had him run was: BASH cd /home//mail/cur du -h ./ The output was 1.3GB. Yes, that's right, he had 1.3GB of mail files. Some people are unaware Read More »

How-To: Password Protect Apache Directories with .htaccess

Drew — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 09:17:54 +0000

Have you ever wanted to let someone download a file or image from your website, but didn't want to have the whole world know about, such as Google's great search engine spiders? The robot.txt file only goes so far, personally I'd rather password protect my directories if I don't want them crawled. It's a great way to set up realms that only the privileged few know about. I'll walk you through the very simple steps of doing so, and showing you what gets added on the server side. Grab Your Read More »

Understanding CHMOD and Creating permissions without a calculator

Drew — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:06:41 +0000

CHMOD (chmod) is a UNIX oriented command that means "Changing Mode", that let's you change the mode (hence the name) of the file, or directory(s) depending on how the chmod command is used. When I say "changing mode", I mean giving the file a different permission scheme, respectively read, write, and execute. This command, by the way, is one of the most useful and most used commands in Linux (among many others). UNIX/Linux vs. MS Windows Before getting into syntax and the whys of the Read More »