Mostly about my amusement

Category: Linux (page 4 of 4)

openSUSE upgrade

I moved my wordpress blog onto the server in my basement. The old server was a dual CPU PIII running at 993 Mhz with a gig of RAM.

The server in the basement is PII 450Mhz box with 256MB ram so it was chugging. I wanted to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) for performance reasons but when I ran the command to install it I got back that my version of php was not supported.

openSUSE 10.1 comes with php 5.1.2 so I ran the upgrade via yast (System Update). This had the fun effect of rendering my server un-bootable. The kernel package did not really install so last night I did some quick surgery and got the system booted. This afternoon I installed the DVD drive from my workstation and got the system properly updated.

APC still did not install. Suse and the phpize command (php5-devel package) is apparently broken. Fortunately this webpage has a list of additional repositories. I added LAB-Project since they maintain updated php5 packages including one for APC.

After I added the apc extension to the php5.ini file, the wordpress pages load almost twice as fast before. Mysql was updated to version 5 so that may have also been a factor.

Ubuntu upgrade to 6.06 Flight 7

easyOn my workstation I had been running Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I primarily run Windows XP Pro because that is the environment that my games run in.

I had read that 6.06 beta was coming along very nicely so I booted up on Linux and used the updater to get the latest 5.10 updates.

The Ubuntu web page at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperFlight7 has very easy upgrade instructions. I opened up a terminal window and just ran

gksudo “update-manager -d”

This downloaded and installed over 1400 software packages. It was so easy. All I had to do was modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf so that the device driver became nv instead of nvidia. I probably could have kept the nvidia driver since the old kernel was preserved but as I said I am not running games and don’t need the accelerated 3D drivers yet.

The experience was so simple and easy to do. This confirms my idea of running SuSE on the server and Ubuntu on the workstation.

Basement server installed

SUSE not Fedora

My Internet gateway at home is a old Dell XPS 450. It’s a PII running at 450Mhz, has a 30GB IDE drive, and 256MB RAM. No cd-rom drive, I removed it when it broke a few years ago. When I need to install an operating system, I temporarily attach a DVD drive.

I was previously running Fedora Core 3 on it. Fedora is okay, but it is on an aggressive development schedule. For example Fedora Core 2 was released May 18, 2004, patches are currently supported by the Fedora Legacy Project. That’s how the model works, the main project works on releases and patches for a small amount of time. Then the Legacy project takes over the patches. It’s all well documented and explained.

My problem is the amount of time for main project support is too short. I don’t want to keep installing a new Linux distribution, but I do want timely patches. The legacy project is pretty good, but they definitely have resource issues. The current Fedora Core gets patched quickly as you expect. But in order to stay current you should have the latest release.

The SUSE ftp server has patches for the 9.0 release, which came out October 2003. That is the kind of support I am looking for. I downloaded the SUSE Linux OSS 10.0 CD images, ran a script to create a DVD image. I burnt the DVD, attached a drive to my old box and installed away.

Postfix, Spamassassin, anti-virus, Oh My

Now that ports 25 and 80 are no longer blocked, I wanted to use the basement box as a backup mail server.

I want the server to

  • receive mail for dembowski.net and epyon-1.com
  • use TLS encryption if possible
  • check the sender’s IP address against Spamhaus
  • greylist the traffic
  • virus scan the mail
  • rate the content for spam

BookofpostfixI installed the SUSE package for Postfix and configured it to only accept mail for my domains, open mail relays are BAD. I referred to The Book of Postfix for guidance; Postfix is now a breeze. The only thing I deviated from was to generate a self signed certificate as so

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 3650 -nodes -x509 -keyout dixie.dembowski.net.pem -out dixie.dembowski.net.pem

This created a self signed key and certificate with an expiration of 10 years. That is the pem file that I refer to in my postfix main.cf file.

Greylisting is the number one most effective thing I have added to kill spam. It works like this: a mail server connects to my server and tries to deliver mail. The servers IP address, the sender’s e-mail address, and the recipient’s address goes into a database. Instead of accepting the mail, my server sends back a 450 code, which basically says “Not now I’m busy. Try back in 5 minutes”. A RFC compliant mail server will attempt to re-send later, and all further attempts (after 300 seconds) from the IP address, sender e-mail, recipient e-mail combination will be accepted.

Spammers typically do not try to re-send, and the sender’s e-mail is often random so they never get in at all. See http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/ for more info, this is a very effective means to control unwanted mail.

I downloaded a postgrey RPM from http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/el3/i386/SRPMS/postgrey-1.23-0.src.rpm and modified the postgrey.sysv file to match SUSE. Rebuilt package and installed.

I added the SUSE packages for Spamassassin, ClamAV, and Amavisd-new for content filtering.

A few tests and all was done. I modified my MX records for my domains, and have been receiving mail on my new box. This server does not attempt to deilver e-mail except to the destination servers for my two domains.

Ubuntu Linux

ubuntu.pngI had been thinking about playing with Ubuntu Linux for some time now and at the end of October I went to the web site https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ and ordered a set of Ubuntu 5.10 CDs. You fill out the form, and they ship you CDs for free. Minimum order is 5.

Friday the CDs (5 sets, cool) arrived and in each CD folder is an install CD and a Live CD. I ran the live CD on my desktop and also on my laptop. The Live CD is very functional and I could not break it. Even when I made my laptop sleep, the session “woke up” without a hitch. My graphic and sound cards were supported. Applications like e-mail clients, web browser, I even ran Synaptic and updated the running live session. Worked flawlessly.

I am typically a RedHat Linux user from version 4.2 and on. This server runs the free RedHat derivative Fedora. But the desktop experience for both RedHat and Fedora has always been very lacking. Applications break (I could kill the e-mail client Evolution in 5 minutes, I don’t know why) and the desktop felt less than user friendly. It was just all part of the Geek Appeal. You expected Linux to be clumsy and require editing of files using vi.

Ubuntu Linux installed on my desktop with no problem. I have a nvidia 6800GT graphics card. In the past I would install a Linux distribution, get it working, install nvidia’s drivers, edit configuration files by hand, experience some pain till I got all the options right. Eventually I would be able to run my 3D accelerated video game (which BTW runs perfectly on the same dual booting Windows XP system) and enjoy.

On Ubuntu it is just a matter of running Synaptic (GUI for package management) installing some packages, and run a simple command. The whole process is well documented here.

Everything works really well. For a desktop solution this is the most easy going distribution I have seen so far.