Mysql weekly/monthly backup: reliability in simplicity

Posted by on 01/26/2011 No comments

mysqlI’ve been asked many times to put together mysql database backup with weekly/monthly rotation.
I’m pretty sure there are plenty of such scripts out there on the web.
I am going to add mine so that somebody can compare and choose.
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Linux: booted into GRUB shell – now what?

Posted by on 01/25/2011 No comments

grub_shellYou’ve decided to reboot your Linux Desktop (or remote server) and instead of getting to running system you were greeted by something like this

Why did it happen and where to go from here?
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Apache, PHP, SuEXEC: lessons learned

Posted by on 01/21/2011 No comments

I’ve been running PHP in fastcgi mode with suExec for some time on about 50+ servers with different workload and various content. There are some tips and tricks that can improve the performance and increase the stability of such configuration.
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Apache2, PHP, SuEXEC: legacy CGI for ClipShare and the rest of them

Posted by on 12/24/2010 No comments

In this article we configured apache2 with php as suExec CGI module. The configuration is a little bit more complicated then regular mod_php but offers definite advantage with php running with script owner privileges.
However there could be situations where this creates additional problems.
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iomega StorCenter 150d NAS: NFS hack improvement

Posted by on 11/18/2010 No comments

This is repost from iomega forums – approved by iomega somehow.
I had the same problem as many – I have to upgrade customer hard drive and for that I’ve planned to shift his 1.2TB of content to the nas and to have him run from there to minimize downtime while I’ll resize his LVM partition.
All I have for that is iomega StorCener Pro 150d NAS
As many others I’ve discovered that iomega nas exports nfs filesystems with absolutely usless options

– I’m not planning to create appropriate users/groups on the nas itself – it’s going to be colossal waste of time and most likely wouldn’t help me with my problem anyway.
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CentOS apache conf.d dark mystery: why some virtual hosts are more equal then others

Posted by on 11/07/2010 No comments

I’ve got a complain the other day: for some reason some virtualhosts on dedicated server was not working properly with suExec PHP as configured.
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Using lsof to find trojan processes on Linux.

Posted by on 11/06/2010 4 comments

In my previous post I was telling about checking for programs using network on Linux using lsof tool.
Here I have “live” example of such backdoor found on one of our servers.
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Apache2, PHP, SuEXEC configuration on CentOS

Posted by on 11/06/2010 2 comments

There are plenty of tutorials on the web. Tons and tons.

However when I had to create working configuration and put together Virtualmin template most of these instruction just didn’t work properly. After some time I’ve came up with my own working configuration and proper Virtualmin apache template for CentOS.

As a bonus we’ll have per-user php.ini and apache2 worker MPM which is a little bit faster and less resource hungry then traditional prefork MPM.
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Sysadmin shell oneliner: update serial in all DNS zones

Posted by on 10/22/2010 No comments

Sometimes you just need to force updates on slave DNS servers. The easiest way to do it is to increase zone serials on master server. what if there are hundreds of zone files? Here is one way to do it
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Centos5: OCFS2 cluster FS on dual primary DRBD: why it doesn’t mount OCFS2 on boot?

Posted by on 10/20/2010 No comments

I have couple of these – how to configure it pretty easy to found (may be later I’ll go over the setup here too). The problem is – with everything else running perfectly fine OCFS2 partitions are never mounted automagically on boot. Just recently I found out why
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