Osiblog

I have set up a PPTP VPN client on my Ubuntu server. Unfortunately when the server reboots, the connection goes down and stays down. After a long search I found a solution on this website. It is simple bash script, which checks if the VPN server (which had the VPN ip of 10.8.3.0) is pingable. If not it restarts the PPTP VPN connection.

ping -c3 10.8.3.0 > pingreport
result=`grep "0 received" pingreport`
truncresult="`echo "$result" | sed 's/^\(.................................\).*$/\1/'`"
if [[ $truncresult == "3 packets transmitted, 0 received" ]]; then
pon company-vpn
fi

I execute this script every five minutes, by editing the /etc/crontab file and added the following rule:

*/5 *   * * *   root    bash /root/vpn-check.sh

Linux pptp, Ubuntu, ubuntu server, VPN

This tutorial describes the installation process of MediaWiki on Ubuntu server. We assume you have already MySQL and Apache installed.

First we start installing the mediawiki software:

$ sudo apt-get install mediawiki

Read more…

Linux, Software howto, mediawiki, tutorial, Ubuntu

In my /var/log/mail.log I saw the following error:

In order to fix this execute the following commands:

 # sudo su cyrus

This will make you the cyrus user.

Now execute

 # squatter

This will index all your e-mails (more info by executing $ man squatter). This index is not incremental so you need to run this task once in a while. It might be usefull to create a cronjob for this command.

Linux cyrus, mailserver, squat, Ubuntu

When I opened Roundcube, the login screen asked me every time for a server name. This turned out to be pretty annoying since this is localhost all the time. In order to remove this field open /etc/roundcube/main.inc.php in your favorite texteditor and set the property

Refresh your page and the server textbox has been disappeared.

Linux mailserver, roundcube, Ubuntu

Virtual domains can be used to route e-mails from multiple domains to the correct mailboxes. In order to make it work, some changes need to be made.

First we need to edit the main.cf (on my Ubuntu server in /etc/postfix/) and add the following lines:

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Linux Linux, mailserver, postfix, Ubuntu

After checking out my mail logs I had the following error:

Aug  6 11:38:52 Nephtys postfix/lmtp[3990]: DD69A18A90C: to=, relay=none,
delay=593, delays=593/0.02/0.01/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred
(connect to localhost[/var/run/cyrus/socket/lmtp]: Permission denied)

I Googled the error but could not find a fix. Finally it turned out that the postfix user was not in the mail group, which could be fixed by executing

 # adduser postfix mail

Linux cyrus, mailserver, postfix, Ubuntu

It turned out my Ubuntu server does not start Subversion automatically on boot. I found this website with instructions how to create a startup script.

Create a file called “svnserve” in the /etc/init.d folder

$ sudo nano /etc/init.d/svnserve

Add the following line to this script in order to start the Subversion server:

svnserve -d --root /srv/subversion

Save the file (CTRL+O) and exit nano (CTRL+X)
Now make the file executable

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/svnserve

Add the svnserve script to the init.d boot sequence

$ sudo update-rc.d svnserve defaults

Now you’re done! On the next reboot the SVN server will start automatically.

Linux subversion, svn, Ubuntu, ubuntu server

I noticed that I connect a lot to my server in order to retrieve files, so I thought it would be useful to connect through NFS instead of Samba. Installing NFS on my server was a piece of cake. Just follow this tutorial and you are done.

The only thing you need to do then is manage your shares in the /etc/exports file. So far so good. But when I want to connect I receive an error which tells me I use the wrong username and/or password. Funny enough the whole system did not even prompt for any of these credentials.

NFS connection error in OSX

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Linux NFS, Ubuntu

The last few days I keep having trouble connecting to my imap server running Cyrus. I started to view my syslog when trying to authenticate to the Cyrus server, there was one line interesting:

I thought it should have something to do with the passwords so I tried to enter the Cyrus server with:

When I entered my password I could not connect. This was weird since I was 100% sure about the correctness. To be sure I resetted all my imap box passwords using:

This didn’t fix it either. Then I read on a website about the saslauthd daemon not running. I restarted the service and everything worked as normal My guess is that an Ubuntu update stopped the saslauthd daemon but did not restart it.

Linux cyrus, imap, Linux, saslauthd, Ubuntu

Quintin Smits has wrote an interesting article describing how you can make your server appear in Finder as a share even over a VPN.

Nephys as a share in Finder

Linux, Software bonjour, OSX, VPN