Ivan Villareal

Using pipes and redirection in the shell we can do backups or restore them, performing compression or decompression on the fly, this are the commands I frequently use:

Create a backup with mysqldump and compress the stream with bzip2

ivan@mini:~$ mysqldump –h dbHost –u dbUser –pdbPass –add-drop-database –databases <dbname> | bzip2 > dbName-02-17-2010.sql.bz2</dbname>

If I want to restore the backup I use:

ivan@mini:~$ bunzip2 < dbName-02-17-2010.sql.bz2 | mysql –h dbHost –u dbUser –pdbPass

I can switch bzip2 compression by changing only the program name for example gzip/gunzip lzma/unlzma

I just got a couple of vps servers, that I have to configure to run some apps, this are the tasks I did to have them ready for production use:

This servers didn’t came with a control panel (better for me), so the first thing I did was to login:

ivan@mini:~$ ssh root@23.45.12.56

After this I checked the OS, version and architecture

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# cat /etc/*release*
CentOS release 5.4 (Final)
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# uname -a
Linux V100205C4HB9V-1 2.6.18-028stab064.7 #1 SMP Wed Aug 26 13:11:07 MSD 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]#

Ok, now that I know the OS I create a normal user to avoid using the root account.

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# useradd –Gwheel ivan

Then I change the server name to mygdon

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 /]# sed -i 's/V100205C4HB9V-1/mygdon/g' /etc/sysconfig/network
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# sed -i 's/V100205C4HB9V-1/mygdon/g' /etc/hosts
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# echo HOST.DOMAIN.com > /etc/hostname
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# hostname -F /etc/hostname

Unfortunately I was unable to persist the new hostname, because it is a VPS server, there are ways around this, but didn’t have the time to make the changes so I just moved on, and leave this for later

The next thing I did was update the OS, and add the rpmforge repo because I will need some apps from there

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# yum update
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# yum upgrade
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.$dist.rf.$arch.rpm
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# yum update
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# yum upgrade

Then I installed some packages I often use:

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# yum install htop screen vim-enhanced

The VPS already had a web stack installed I just did some configuration:

Configuring Apache Virtual Hosts

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# mkdir /var/www/vhosts/{site1, site2} –p
[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Here I Uncommented the following directive

NameVirtualHost *:80

and Added a default vhost a new vhost

<virtualhost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/default
    ServerName mygdon.site1.net
    <directory /var/www/vhosts/default>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </directory>
    ErrorLog logs/mygdon.site1.net-error_log
    CustomLog logs/mygdon.site1.net-access_log common
</virtualhost>
 
<virtualhost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/site2
    ServerName appname.site2.net
    <directory /var/www/vhosts/site2>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </directory>
    ErrorLog logs/appname.site2.net-error_log
    CustomLog logs/appname.site2.net-access_log common
</virtualhost>

then restarted the apache server:

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# service httpd restart
Stopping httpd:                                            [  OK  ]
Starting  httpd:                                            [  OK  ]

and  I wrote a simple php file to test this out:

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 ~]# echo '<? phpinfo(); ?>' > /var/www/vhosts/site1/index.php

And because I haven’t configured a DNS server I just temporarily added the server to my hosts file (On my local machine):

root@mini:/etc# echo 'subdomain.site1.net 54.65.74.23' > /etc/hosts

and here is the result:

Configuring Mysql

Once I had the virtual hosts configuration in place I added a mysql user and changed the default root password:

[root@V100205C4HB9V-1 vhosts]# mysql
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 5
Server version: 5.0.77 Source distribution
 
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
 
mysql> show databases;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| mysql              |
| test               |
+--------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('pass-here') WHERE user='root';
Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 3  Changed: 3  Warnings: 0
 
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> CREATE USER 'ivan'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass-here';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'ivan'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> CREATE USER 'ivan'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass-here';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'ivan'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql>

Now the server is  ready for adding some virtual hosts, I just need to configure a DNS server and the mail server, but because the DNS is on another server and already working I just have to add a new zone, as for mail server, this server will be only used to send emails so I don’t need to dig in postfix configuration files for now.

I’ll write another post regarding the security, but for now this will work.

I got this new mini 110, it came with Windows 7 Starter, and after a day of using it I was very frustrated because it was very limiting, for example, I was unable to change my Desktop background, the network management is confusing and frustrating, and it had a lot of crapware, except for the hp games, that some of them are fun.

Anyway, right now I don’t have time to spend getting a new OS on this machine, I just want something that works, I don’t plan using this to work, but I would like to have some of the tools I use into this.

So my options were, trying Ubuntu remix or Windows Xp, after checking that hp had the drivers for XP, I was going to change Windows 7 to Xp, but I was reading how to create a USB boot drive, and it was too much hassle for me. (I’m very lazy for any Microsoft stuff).

My next option was Ubuntu remix, I’m not a big fan of Ubuntu, but I wanted something to just worked out of the box, also this little netbook comes with splashtop, a really nice feature for checking stuff online fast, and I didn’t want to loose this so I really didn’t knew how well this was going to work.

I started downloading Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic yesterday night, just in case, Today after more frustrating things, I decided to give Karmic a try.

I grabbed my usb pendrive, a 1gb  kingston traveler, mounted the iso and ran usbinst.exe, it was pretty straightforward, my only advice to you would be to avoid saving space for your documents in the usb, my first try I set this to 30Mb and the boot failed, so I set the do not save feature.

It took about 40 minutes to finish copying the files, after it was done, I restarted the netbook with the pendrive connected, and at the first boot screen I pressed F9 key for booting options, selected the pendrive and that was it.

After testing ubuntu from the pendrive, it ran pretty well and everything but the wifi worked, I did an installation, keeping the windows partition and the hp restore partition, just in case.

The installation was pretty smooth, no issues at all, after the first boot I just installed the broadcom drivers, it was pretty easy with the driver manager in ubuntu, and the wifi was working

Update: My hp mini was stolen by a couple of elderly people, I saw the video , so I’m unable to play more with this, but the time I had this I was very happy with it, it performed well.

I often have to upload files to several servers, and some of them doesn’t have an rsync or ftp server, so if I’m going to make a deployment, I have to use scp, or sftp to upload the files.

This works well when I need to make a quick change or test 1 file, but If I have to synchronize several files it is a very time consuming task.

So what I use in this cases is sshfs it is a pretty cool tool, to allow me to mount any filesystem so I can use any rsync on a remote server without dealing with opening ports configure, the server or do other stuff,

Gentoo is my main OS, so it was really easy to have this working, I had to reconfigure the kernel to support fuse

Symbol: FUSE_FS [=m]
Location:
  -> File systems
      -> Filesystem in Userspace support

and after this was ready I only installed sys-fs/sshfs-fuse

[I] sys-fs/sshfs-fuse
     Available versions:  1.9 ~2.1 2.2
     Installed versions:  2.2(12:33:09 PM 09/08/2009)
     Homepage:            http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html
     Description:         Fuse-filesystem utilizing the sftp service.

when it was ready I did the following to mount the remote filesystem:

ivan@gondor ~ $ sshfs phpfix@prestant.citizenhawk.net: preasent/

After this I’m able to use the remote file system as usual.

I have the need to install php5 and mysql 5 on a centos 4 server, so I found that the Centos Plus repository had this, and this is what I did to get these two working.

First check what is the version of the distro:

cat /etc/*release*

Then make an update:

yum update

After 496 package updates I’ve installed php5

yum --enablerepo=centosplus install php

This were the installed packages:

php-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10
php-cli-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10
php-common-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10

So I’ve created a info.php file, and restarted the apache server:

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /var/www/html/info.php && service httpd restart

It was working correctly, so the next thing was to have mysql 5 in it, so I did:

yum --enablerepo=centosplus install mysql-server

I got some problems here, first I got this:

Transaction Check Error: file /etc/my.cnf from install of mysql-libs-5.0.68-1.el4_6 conflicts with file from package mysql-4.1.22-2.el4
file /usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml from install of mysql-libs-5.0.68-1.el4_6 conflicts with file from package mysql-4.1.22-2.el4
file /usr/share/mysql/charsets/README from install of mysql-libs-5.0.68-1.el4_6 conflicts with file from package mysql-4.1.22-2.el4
file /usr/share/mysql/charsets/armscii8.xml from install of mysql-libs-5.0.68-1.el4_6 conflicts with file from package mysql-4.1.22-2.el4
file /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ascii.xml from install of mysql-libs-5.0.68-1.el4_6 conflicts with file from package mysql-4.1.22-2.el4

So what I found was that yum was trying to install mysql.i386 but the architechture is x86_64, to fix this I had to specify the arch

yum --enablerepo=centosplus install mysql.x86_64 mysql-server

After this I was able to install it, but when I tried to start the server I received some errors about error messages not right, I’ve checked the installed packages and it was installed mysqlclient10, so I removed the error messages problem disappeared, however I still couldn’t startup the server, checking at the logs I found this:

InnoDB: Creating foreign key constraint system tables
InnoDB: Foreign key constraint system tables created
091012 11:01:18  InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 0                       091012 11:01:18 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist                                                     091012 11:01:18  mysqld ended                                               

To fix this I cleared the data dir, that had som files, this was in ‘/var/lib/mysql’ and after that I ran mysql_install_db:

[root@prestant /]# cd /var/lib/mysql 
[root@prestant mysql]# rm -rf *
[root@prestant mysql]# mysql_install_db --user=mysql -ldata=/var/lib/mysql
[root@prestant mysql]# service mysqld start

After the server was up, I changed the root password and added a new user:

[root@prestant mysql]# mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD
[root@prestant mysql]# mysql -pNEWPASSWORD
 

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 5
Server version: 5.0.82sp1 Source distribution
 
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.
 
mysql> CREATE USER 'ivan'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'passhere';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'ivan'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'passhere' WITH GRANT OPTION MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_UPDATES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 0 ;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> CREATE USER 'ivan'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'passhere';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'ivan'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> exit
Bye