Internet Services from KKoncepts

We use the vsftpd FTP server to give our clients FTP access for uploading to their web sites. But being the paranoid types that we are, we require everything to be encrypted. So you need an FTP client which can do FTPES - FTP with Explicit SSL/TLS. We recommend FileZilla, but any client which can do FTPES will work.

We generally use RAID1 arrays for the "/boot" partition of our servers for redundancy. RAID1 means that the partitions are all identical, and therefore all the drives hold the information necessary to boot. So we take /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 and create /dev/md0 where we mount "/boot". Then we install grub in the MBR of both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb pointing it to the proper partition so that if the first drive fails, the second can boot in its place.

While Singapore has fantastic internet access, I often find that the Singapore debian mirror isn't as fast as I expect. (The Singapore Ubuntu mirror, however, is FAST - no issues there.) It's not "slow" - I've lived places where 10Kb on a download was cause for all the other IT guys in the office to gather around the screen and watch in wonder! It's just that my home connection has 1 Mb down, but I don't think I've ever seen over 150 Kb from this mirror.

I recently installed Debian Squeeze beta in VirtualBox to begin testing our systems for the eventual migration to Squeeeze when it comes out.

The first thing I always do when I set up a non-GUI system is adjust the default 640x480 console resolution to something a bit more usable. In the previous version of Grub, that was easy. You simply added "vga=771" (or whatever VGA code matched your desired size and depth) to the kernel line and everything works perfectly.

Thunderbird was upgraded today on my 64-bit Ubuntu Lucid laptop and it promptly disabled Lightning because the official Lightning plug-in is only compiled for 32-bit machines.

Recently we created a webform for a client's Drupal site where people could sign up for their newsletter. Unfortunately, as soon as we created it the spambots started hitting it. So we needed to put a CAPTCHA on the form to stop the spam submissions. While not immediately apparent how to do this in Drupal, it's pretty easy once you know the procedure.

We've cleaned up our documentation on how we set up DRBD and Heartbeat for High-Availability Virtual Servers and made it available in the "Documentation" area of our site.

Surf on over to Vservers and High-Availability if you want to see all the gory details. :-)

Recent our CentOS vservers have refused to upgrade the "filesystem" rpm. It gives the error:unpacking of archive failed on file /proc: cpio: chown

Fortunately the fix is easy once you know it. Edit the file "/etc/rpm/macros" inside the guest and add "/proc" to the "%_netsharedpath" line. (Separate entries by a colon.)

So if the line presently says:

%_netsharedpath  /dev:/etc/rc.d/init.d/halt
Change it to say:

%_netsharedpath    /dev:/etc/rc.d/init.d/halt:/proc

Recently I wrote my own start/stop script for our vservers. The "util-vserver" package gives you a little control over the order that the servers are stopped and started, but I wanted to specify the exact order that virtual machines started and stopped in the event of a heartbeat takeover.

Being a perl "fan boy" from way back, I have a lot of small perl scripts lying around that I use to look through logs for something specific. We use Cacti and Nagios for "real" monitoring, but I've got scripts to see which email accounts have failed authentication attempts, who's logged into certain services in the past X days, how many connections our email server has rejected based on blacklisting, etc., etc.