debian

PHP segmentation fault if both curl and postgres modules loaded (debian)

Running some porting scripts (command line PHP) for drupal yesterday - and for the first time trying out postgres.

I kept getting a segmentation fault at the end of each script.

Turns out that there is some issue with the curl and postgres php modules.

For a workaround on debian see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=411982#120 - it changes the order of loading.

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Increasing max number of open files for glassfish user on debian

My glassfish process kept dying with "Too many open files" in the log.

I'm not surprised that it has too many - it has quite a few large applications running - but how to increase this?

ulimit -n shows that the user has a default of 1024.

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Linux disk activity checking

As part of Building a debian firewall on a CF card I was trying to make sure that disk writes to the firewall CF card were kept to a minimum.

However - I've never really been able to test this. So I was pleased to find http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/faq - under section 5 there is a question titled "My disk spins up all the time and I have no clue what causes this. Can I debug this?".

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Git commit mail (debian)

With the backported git 1.6 packages installed (see Backport git 1.6 for debian) - to add mailing lists for commits/tags:

cd src/<project>.git/hooks
ln -s /usr/share/doc/git-core/contrib/hooks/post-receive-email post-receive
git config --add hooks.mailinglist "development@mailhost.tld"
git config --add hooks.announcelist "announce@mailhost.tld"
git config --add hooks.envelopesender "from_addr@host.tld"

Note that /usr/share/doc/git-core/contrib/hooks/post-receive-email must be executable - chmod a+x if you need to.

Backport git 1.6 for debian

git 1.6 is available in debian experimental. I want to use it under debian stable (etch).

Let's backport it.

Kudos to Steve Kemp for walking me through this.

Increase entropy on a 2.6 kernel linux box

A good source of entropy is needed for random number generation. This affects services that go via SSL amongst other things.

However - in 2.6.x kernels the entropy sources of a system were reduced - as far as I can see it now is only affected by keyboard, mouse and some IRQ interrupts.

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Daily cron scripts don't always run - check filenames

I noticed that some of my scripts in /etc/cron.daily were not running.

It turns out that filenames with a dot in them (foo.sh, bar.pl) etc simply don't run.

Remove the dots (drop the extension - of course linux doesn't need them - they were only for my convenience) and it all works.

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Booting from grub shell

When you install grub to debian and forget to run update-grub the first time before you reboot then there is no menu.lst file in /boot/grub so you boot to the grub shell

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Using a self-generated Certificate Authority for OpenSSL on debian etch

I've been using self-signed certificates for a while - but - that means getting the users to approve them each time they change. Instead - lets generate a Certificate Authority (CA) certificate with a reasonably long life - get them to install that and then new certificates signed with that will be valid for them.

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Patching denyhosts to allow correct plugin reporting

This is a copy of an article I have recently had published on www.debian-administration.org

Imagine you have denyhosts installed and it is adding new attackers to /etc/hosts.deny. Wouldn't it be great to inform the relevant people so that some action could be taken? With the right plugin that is possible, but there is a problem with the default reporting that we'll explain here.

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