I tried installing IPTables::IPv4 so that I can manage firewall rules from a perl script but unfortunately the ‘make test’ stage failed in such a way that it setup some rules that blocked all traffic to and from the server! To be honest, that’s a pretty bad module if there’s a chance it might lock you out during the install process!
Some 35 minutes later and everything was working ok again thanks to some swift ticket responses from PoundHost tech support.
Rule #1 (along with all the other #1’s), never do anything firewall related on a remote server unless you have a way to back it out if something goes wrong.
Category: Linux
logrotate quirk
For several weeks now (since a logrotate version upgrade) I’ve been experiencing postrotate scripts that weren’t working. Putting it down to a temporary glitch I just ignored it but today I finally decided to work out what was up.
A new server
I’ve got a new server to replace this one, the primary reason being that with all the sites and services on here there’s less disk space available than would be nice. There’s also the fact that the server is a little slow at times, and is running a really ancient version of RedHat. I’ve tried upgrading it (in place, without a reboot) to Fedora Core 2 and although it works, it’s got a lot of stuff left lying around that shouldn’t be there.
Another disk failure
Well, once again I’ve got a failed disk in my Linux software RAID array. That’s got to be the third one that’s been flagged as failed within the last 6 months – they’re Maxtor 160GB drives. The last one that failed had a comprehensive PowerMAX test run on it and it passed everything. PowerMAX is the DOS utility that you have to run in order to get a special diagnostic code so that you can RMA the drive if it’s still under warranty.
MySQL Replication problem
Had some problems with MySQL replication yesterday. I setup a new slave to join a bunch of existing ones and found that although ‘LOAD DATA FROM MASTER’ worked fine, once it had got an up-to-date copy of the data that was all it ever had. None of the new transactions from the master were processed on the new slave server.
Solution: server-id on the new slave was set to 1 and conflicted with one of the other servers. Doh!
Fedora PPC
Well, I’ve had my powerbook for almost a year now and although OSX is nice enough, at times I try to compile applications (as in download source, ./configure, make, make install) and it just will not compile.
Figured I’d try Fedora PPC (core 3) and although it’s not fully ready guessed I could live with a few minor bugs here and there… well, I was wrong.
User Mode Linux
I’ve just spent the best part of 9 hours installing a Fedora Core 3 User Mode Linux (UML) filesystem and configuring it so that it works. It’s been a learning experience for sure, but once I’ve backed up the virtual disks, I can play around with various things like apache2/mod_perl2 without breaking any existing servers and if it all goes horribly wrong, I can just restore the disk back to how it was.
Fedora Core 3
Having recently tried to install a new machine at work with Fedora Core 3, I’ve decided that I won’t be getting myself a MegaRAID i4 IDE RAID card at any point.
Fedora Core 1 -> Core 2 upgrade
Despite what several people have said about upgrading from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2, I decided to have a go on my linux box at home (the one this site runs on will have to wait until I have figured out how to upgrade from RedHat 7.3 to FC2).
What does $รข mean ?
Since Fedora Core 1 was installed on my linux box at home, I’ve noticed that connecting to it via ssh from Windows or OS X always resulted in strange characters appearing in man pages and certain terminal based applications.
I’ve finally figured out how to stop it…