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

Munin is a networked server monitoring tool written in Perl. Munin consists of two parts: the Munin server and Munin nodes. The nodes are running on the servers we want to monitor, while the server periodically (5 minutes by default) fetches the data from all of the registered nodes. The server is a able to build charts from this node data, which gives insight in the cpu usage, disk usage, network load and more.

The Munin team has a live demo of Munin, which can be viewed at http://munin.ping.uio.no/ I have installed both the Munin node and server on my Ubuntu server machine, and added nodes of other servers as well.

Munin screenshot with custom theme

general munin, server, Ubuntu, ubuntu server

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:

Read more…

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

Read more…

Linux NFS, Ubuntu

Angry IP scanner is a free network scanner which supports Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. It has an intuitive GUI which makes it easy to use. You can download Angry IP scanner here, more screenshots are available here.

Software Linux, OSX, Software, Ubuntu, windows