Archive for May, 2008

Seven golden sysadmin rules

Monday, May 26th, 2008

1. Document everything you do ; You or someone else would come accross the same issue sometime else and from my long experiance; if you dont document you probably would have to start over again!
2. Face the issue from the head and tackle it from the tail! . The best sysadmin practice would be [...]

cpanel script to extract reseller users and domain names

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

This bash script is very useful if you are planning to do cpanel account migrations purely from the commandline and automate the process of the migration . This scripts extracts the names of all reseller users in the server to the file
/opt/reseller_list
and correspondingly for all users in this list extract the cpanel usernames to the [...]

apache2 mod_suphp php-cgi

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

A slight change in the setup and now i can see the user who is executing the scripts in my website
Before when apache intrepets a php script it calls fastcgi which inturn calls the php cgi binary.But still the php binary is executed as the calling user which in our case is the user [...]

apache mod_fcgid internal server error

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Today gnusys.net had a little downtime as i was trying to change my apache-php interface into FastCGI.
The installation of php-cgi and mod_fcgid went pretty simple in my Debian Etch;so was the configuration
The tricky part was that the wordpress blog was giving Internal Server Error in the index page.
====
[Thu May 22 04:15:41 2008] [notice] mod_fcgid: call [...]

Apache Security

Friday, May 16th, 2008

As everyone knows Apache is the most widely used web server and it has got a 75-25 usage rate when compared to Microsoft IIS. IIS was widely used before Apache and some of the major security flaws made people to rely on Apache which is upfront in terms of Security , flexibility and Reliability. I [...]

plesk increase php memory_limit for a vhost

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

You can change the php memory_limit value for a particular domain or on a per virtual host basis by the following way
Add the following line to the file
/home/httpd/vhosts/gnusys.net/conf/vhost.conf
php_admin_value memory_limit “128M”
Reconfigure the vhost by running the following command
/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng –reconfigure-vhost –vhost-name=gnusys.net
and restart the webserver using the command
/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng –restart
Check if the setting is correct using phpinfo(); function

plesk script to extract mailname password

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

The following script retrieves the password of a mailname given the mail account name as input
This is version.2.0 of the same .The previous one i had written was very complex and created many files in /tmp which was useless.Version 2.0 is an elegant approach and will not create any stale files!
wget http://gnusys.net/downloads/psamailpass.bash
bash psamailpass.bash

Plesk DNSZone.php error

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

If you get the following error while managing a domain in parallels plesk control panel
=====
0: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/dns/DNSZone.php:49
DNSZone->DNSZone(string ‘1′)
1: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:2875
objectMaker(string ‘DNSZone’, string ‘1′)
2: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/dns/DNSManager.php:39
DNSManager::getDNSZone(string ‘1′)
3: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/dns/DNSManager.php:75
DNSManager::getDefaultDNSZone()
4: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/dns/DNSManager.php:104
DNSManager::syncDNSZoneAdminEmail(string ‘plesk@white.nl’, string ‘plesk2@white.nl’)
5: /usr/local/psa/admin/htdocs/server/admin_ed.php3:88
admin_ed(array, array, array)
6: /usr/local/psa/admin/htdocs/server/admin_ed.php3:171
====
chances are that you have manually removed some entry from the psa database
Please insert the following into the psa database dns_zone table
mysql -uadmin -p`cat [...]

mysqlhotcopy a low resource consuming mysql backup

Monday, May 12th, 2008

mysqlhotcopy is a perl script that can backup mysql databases using the MyISAM engines(InnoDb is not supported!) in a faster and efficient way
Following is a simple script to backup all your database to a directory (Preferably this directory should be in a hard drive different from your mysql databases so that there is no data [...]

Howto Install Xcache

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Xcache is a very good php cache that can accelerate php page deliveries .The following example uses xcache version 1.2.2.Please check the website http://xcache.lighttpd.net/ before you start the installation for the latest available release of this actively maintained software
neutron:~# wget http://xcache.lighttpd.net/pub/Releases/1.2.2/xcache-1.2.2.tar.gz
neutron:~# tar -xvzf xcache-1.2.2.tar.gz
neutron:~# cd xcache-1.2.2/
neutron:~/xcache-1.2.2# phpize
neutron:~/xcache-1.2.2# ./configure –enable-xcache –enable-xcache-optimizer
neutron:~/xcache-1.2.2# make
neutron:~/xcache-1.2.2# make install
neutron:~/xcache-1.2.2# cat xcache.ini [...]