Chris Searle

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.

Technorati Tags: debian php

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.

Technorati Tags: debian glassfish linux ulimit

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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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.

Technorati Tags: commit commit e-mail debian email git git 1.6 mail

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.

Technorati Tags: debian debian experimental git git 1.6 git-core git-core_1.6

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.

Technorati Tags: debian entropy linux rng-tools

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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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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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.

Technorati Tags: CA.pl debian openssl ssl

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.

Technorati Tags: abuse debian denyhosts dpkg-buildpackage