installation Archives - Page 2 of 7 - ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary ☩ Walking in Light with Christ

Posts Tagged ‘installation’

xorg on Toshiba Satellite L40 14B with Intel GM965 video hangs up after boot and the worst fix ever / How to reinstall Ubuntu by keeping the old personal data and programs

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

I have updated Ubuntu version 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 and followed the my previous post update ubuntu from 9.04 to Latest Ubuntu

I expected that a step by step upgrade from a release to release will work like a charm and though it does on many notebooks it doesn't on Toshiba Satellite L40

The update itself went fine, whether I used the update-manager -d and followed the above pointed tutorial, however after a system restart the PC failed to boot the X server properly, a completely blank screen with blinking cursor appeared and that was all.

I restarted the system into the 2.6.35-28-generic kernel rescue-mode recovery kernel in order to be able to enter into physical console.

Logically the first thing I did is to check /var/log/messages and /var/log/Xorg.0.log but I couldn't find nothing unusual or wrong there.

I suspected something might be wrong with /etc/X11/xorg.conf so I deleted it:

ubuntu:~# rm -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and attempted to re-create the xorg.conf X configuration with command:

ubuntu:~# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This command was reported to be the usual way to reconfigure the X server settings from console, but in my case (for unknown reasons) it did nothing.

Next the command which was able to re-generate the xorg.conf file was:

ubuntu:~# X -configure

The command generates a xorg.conf sample file in /root/xorg.conf.* so I used the conf to put it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf X's default location and restarted in hope that this would fix the non-booting issue.

Very sadly again the black screen of death appeared on the notebook toshiba screen.
I further thought of completely wipe out the xorg.conf in hope that at least it might boot without the conf file but this worked out neither.

I attempted to run the Xserver with a xorg.conf configured to work with vesa as it's well known vesa X server driver is supposed to work on 99% of the video cards, as almost all of them nowdays are compatible with the vesa standard, but guess what in my case vesa worked not!

The only version of X I can boot in was the failsafe X screen mode which is available through the grub's boot menu recovery mode.

Further on I decided to try few xorg.conf which I found online and were reported to work fine with Intel GM965 internal video , and yes this was also unsucessful.

Some of my other futile attempts were: to re-install the xorg server with apt-get, reinstall the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver e.g.:

ubuntu:~# apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-video-intel

As nothing worked out I was completely pissed off and decided to take an alternative approach which will take a lot of time but at least will probably be succesful, I decided to completely re-install the Ubuntu from a CD after backing up the /home directory and making a list of available packages on the system, so I can further easily run a tiny bash one-liner script to install all the packages which were previously existing on the laptop before the re-install:

Here is how I did it:

First I archived the /home directory:

ubuntu:/# tar -czvf home.tar.gz home/ ....

For 12GB of data with some few thousands of files archiving it took about 40 minutes.

The tar spit archive became like 9GB and I hence used sftp to upload it to a remote FTP server as I was missing a flash drive or an external HDD where I can place the just archived data.

Uploading with sftp can be achieved with a command similar to:

sftp user@yourhost.com Password: Connected to yourhost.com. sftp> put home.tar.gz

As a next step to backup in a file the list of all current installed packages, before I can further proceed to boot-up with the Ubuntu Maverich 10.10 CD and prooceed with the fresh install I used command:

for i in $(dpkg -l| awk '{ print $2 }'); do echo $i; done >> my_current_ubuntu_packages.txt

Once again I used sftp as in above example to upload my_current_update_packages.txt file to my FTP host.

After backing up all the stuff necessery, I restarted the system and booted from the CD-rom with Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu installation as usual is more than a piece of cake and even if you don't have a brain you can succeed with it, so I wouldn't comment on it 😉

Right after the installation I used the sftp client once again to fetch the home.tar.gz and my_current_ubuntu_packages.txt

I placed the home.tar.gz in /home/ and untarred it inside the fresh /home dir:

ubuntu:/home# tar -zxvf home.tar.gz

Eventually the old home directory was located in /home/home so thereon I used Midnight Commander ( the good old mc text file explorer and manager ) to restore the important user files to their respective places.

As a last step I used the my_current_ubuntu_packages.txt in combination with a tiny shell script to install all the listed packages inside the file with command:

ubuntu:~# for i in $(cat my_current_ubuntu_packagespackages.txt); do apt-get install --yes $i; sleep 1; done

You will have to stay in front of the computer and manually answer a ncurses interface questions concerning some packages configuration and to be honest this is really annoying and time consuming.

Summing up the overall time I spend with this stupid Toshiba Satellite L40 with the shitty Intel GM965 was 4 days, where each day I tried numerous ways to fix up the X and did my best to get through the blank screen xserver non-bootable issue, without a complete re-install of the old Ubuntu system.
This is a lesson for me that if I stumble such a shitty issues I will straight proceed to the re-install option and not loose my time with non-sense fixes which would never work.

Hope the article might be helpful to somebody else who experience some problems with Linux similar to mine.

After all at least the Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is really good looking in general from a design perspective.
What really striked me was the placement of the close, minimize and maximize window buttons , it seems in newer Ubuntus the ubuntu guys decided to place the buttons on the left, here is a screenshot:

I believe the solution I explain, though very radical and slow is a solution that would always work and hence worthy 😉
Let me hear from you if the article was helpful.

Tags: blank screen, blinking cursor, com, configured, configureThe, cursor, default location, file, generic kernel, installation, intel, location, log, log messages, Logically, notebook toshiba, notebooks, personal data, rescue mode, root, Satellite, screen, script, server settings, sftp, something, system, toshiba, toshiba satellite, toshiba satellite l40, tutorial, Ubuntu, upgrade, vesa, video, video cards, x server, Xorg, yourhost
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Linux on Laptops, System Administration | No Comments »

Install and Run Multiple Tomcat and JAVA server instances on single Windows server Howto

Friday, June 17th, 2016

I've had a task at my work place to install Multiple Tomcat servers on Windows 2012 Server R2 the task seems trivial however I've faced few minor issues and the few searches in Google returned very few articles discussing the topic and this give me the idea that it might be helpful to others to come up with my own article as this might save time for those Linux guys who need to install Multiple Tomcat instances on the same Windows server without spending too much time to dig into the arcane winblows.

I stumbled on some issues during installation thus took the time to systemize below shortly how I managed to run 2 Tomcat servers on One Windows 2012 R2 machine.

First thing to do is to obtain latest compiled Tomcat server archive from Tomcat's official download page here.

Latest Tomcat stable release as of time of writting this article is 7.0.69, so I've downloaded 64 Bit archive (as the server is running X64 Operating system) and unarchived it twice on the Install server under 2 separate directory locations under:

D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1

and

D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2

Copy of the 7.0.69 X86 tomcat zip archive is here and X64 bit tomcat 7.0.69 is here

Once the files are properly untarred I also needed to download also Java as the WAR application supposed to run on the Windows machine had as requirement Java JDK 8.

Downloading Java is a trivial task, however in my case the server used to be in DMZ (Demiliterized Zone) / Firewalled network and hence instead of using the default Java installer provided from Oracle website which is trying to download from Internet, I had instead to download and use the Offline current JAVA 8u91 version.
Just for sake of some convenience I've made a mirrored version of X86 JAVA 8 (8u91) is here and JAVA 8u91 X64 version here

JAVA JDK install is a trivial task just run the isntaller set the proper locations initially for JDK base folder in my case this was:

D:\Java\jdk

and later throughout during install, I was asked also to fill in full path location for JRE, in my case this was

D:\Java\jre

It was a little bit surprising for me that JRE install path had to be entered and because I was not careful enough I had twice entered the same path for both JRE and JDK, i.e. entered on both prompts:

D:\Java

This caused issues and a messed Java install but I realized that after the 3rd re-install of Java when I decided to also read instead of by habit click Next / Next and Complete the install as used to be in the good old days of Windows XP and Windows 98 🙂

Once Java set up correctly I've tested it with:

C:\Users\georgi> java -version

It is also necessery to set properly following 2 JAVA command line environment variables:

JAVA_HOME
JRE_HOME

On the logged in user Environment Variables with which Tomcat will be running on how to do that check my previous article how to add Environment Variables on Windows

Make sure you have the following 2 environment variables set upped:

JAVA_HOME=D:\Java\jdk

JRE_HOME=D:\Java\jre

For one time set (assuming Java is installed) under D:Javajre and D:Javajdk, you will need to type in command prompt:

set JAVA_HOME=D:\Java\jdk

set JRE_HOME=D:\Java\jre

Once assured Java is running fine I proceeded to run the Tomcat serevrs, in order to make them working it was necessery to change all coinciding Port names under:

conf/server.xml

because if there are coinciding ports (assuming that like me you're trying to run both Tomcat under the same IP address), the servers will fail to run because they're trying to bind under the same Port TCP addresses.

Assuming that the tomcat archive files are copied from .zip into D:TomcatTomcat_Instance-1 and D:TomcatTomcat_Instance-2 folders and you have in each of the 2 the following directory structure:

    /bin : This directory contains the startup and shutdown scripts for both Windows and Linux.
    /conf : This directory contains the main configuration files for Tomcat. The two most important are the server.xml and the global web.xml .
    /server : This directory contains the Tomcat Java Archive files.
    /lib : This directory contains Java Archive files that Tomcat is dependent upon.
    /logs : This directory contains Tomcat’s log files.
    /src : This directory contains the source code used by the Tomcat server. Once Tomcat is released, it will probably contain interfaces and abstract classes only.
    /webapps : All web applications are deployed in this directory; it contains the WAR file.
    /work : This is the directory in which Tomcat will place all servlets that are generated from JSPs. If you want to see exactly how a particular JSP is interpreted, look in this directory.

You will need to edit server.xml in both of the Tomcats and make sure the configuration for ports is not coinciding, i.e., I've changed the following configurations for Tomcat_Instance-2 installation:

    Connector Port : This is the port where Apache Tomcat listen for the HTTP requests. Default port is 8080, I've changed this to 8089 for second Tomcat server
    Shutdown Port : This port is used when we try to shutdown the Apache Tomcat Server. Default port is 8005 so changed that to 8006 in Tomcat_Instance-2
    AJP (Apache JServ Protocol) Connector Port : The Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) is a binary protocol that can conduct inbound requests from a web server through to an application server that sits behind the web server.
I've commented out the configuration for AJP completely and used for my custom needs the following server.xml configuration:

<Connector port="11111" address="10.251.27.24" protocol="AJP/1.3" enableLookups="false"/>

    Redirect Port : Any redirection happening inside Apache Tomcat will happen through this port. In Apache TOMCAT there are two instance where redirect Port is mentioned. First one is for the Apache TOMCAT server and other one is for the AJP port. Default here is port 8443 so changed that one to to listen to 8444 instead.

Another thing necessery to do is to create setenv.bat file under both D:\TomcatTomcat_Instance-1\bin and D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2\bin with following content:

set JRE_HOME=D:\java\jre
set JAVA_HOME=d:\java\jdk
exit /b 0

The quickest way to do it without bothering with Notepad text editor is by issuing:

cd tomcat\Tomcat_Instance1\bin
echo set JRE_HOME=D:\java\jre > setenv.bat
echo set JAVA_HOME=D:javajdk >> setenv.bat

cd tomcat\Tomcat_Instance2\bin
echo set JRE_HOME=D:\java\jre > setenv.bat
echo set JAVA_HOME=D:\java\jdk >> setenv.bat

The setenv.sh is a standard variables file read by Tomcat on Instance start up time

Next part of Tomcat installation is to install each of the 2 instances after defining CATALINA_BASE to point to first and second Tomcat instance directories, e.g open a Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and run there:

set CATALINA_BASE=D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1

C:|> d:

D:|> cd Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin

D:Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin> service install Tomcat_Instance-1

You will get output like:

Using CATALINA_BASE:   " D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1"
Using CATALINA_HOME:   " D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1"
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: " D:\TomcatTomcat_Instance-1\temp"
Using JRE_HOME:        "D:\java\jre"
Using CLASSPATH:       "D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin\bootstrap.jar; D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin\tomcat-juli.jar"

Then for the second Tomcat server instance run in command prompt:

set CATALINA_BASE=D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2

d:

cd Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2\bin
service install Tomcat_Instance-2

Using CATALINA_BASE:   " D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2"
Using CATALINA_HOME:   " D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2"
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: " D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2\temp"
Using JRE_HOME:        "D:\java\jre"
Using CLASSPATH:       "D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin\bootstrap.jar; D:\TomcatTomcat_Instance-2\bin\tomcat-juli.jar"

windows-running-two-tomcat-instances-on-the-same-single-server-screenshot

Here is all the service.bat batch file parameters:

D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-11\bin>service.bat /
?
Unknown parameter "/?"

Usage: service.bat install/remove [service_name] [/user username]

To test both Tomcat servers where they run simultaneously without issues, I run in 2 separate command prompts – opened (cmd.exe) two times and run in each of them:

What this little command does is uses Tomcat7.exe command to Add / Remove / Modify the Tomcat instance into Windows Services, the same can be happily done also with the good old
sc (service configure) windows command.

D:

cd Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin\startup.bat

D:

cd Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2\bin\startup.bat

Both executed without errors in command line and to stop them I've pressed the usual CTRL+C.
To make sure once again both server instances ran wihtout errors, I've checked in D:TomcatTomcat_Instance-{1,2}logs/catalina*.log and in both of them all looked fine.
Another good check if you want to be 10000% sure Tomcat is running is to look up for Tomcat listening on above configured ports, for example run below in cmd:

D:Tomcat> netstat -a|findstr "8080"

I've also used the 2 following command to set up proper Services description for both of services:

D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\tomcat7 //US//Tomcat_Instance1 –Description="Apache Tomcat Server – Tomcat-Instance1.my-site.com"

D:\Tomcat\Instance_Instance-2\tomcat7 //US//Tomcat_Instance2 –Description="Apache Tomcat Server – Tomcat-Instance2.my-site.com "

A very helpful resource during the Apache (Windows Service) instance install / setup /modification that helped me is on Tomcat's official site here

N! B! Very important note to make here for anyone experiencing strange issues when trying to add multiple issues is below:

I've experienced some issues while trying to add the 2 Tomcat servers into Windows services initially with tomcat7.exe command like so:

Trying installing Tomcat71 service with cmd:

tomcat7 //IS//Tomcat71 –DisplayName="Apache Tomcat 7" ^
     –Install="D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-1\bin\tomcat7.exe" –Jvm=auto ^
     –StartMode=jvm –StopMode=jvm ^
     –StartClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap –StartParams=start ^
     –StopClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap –StopParams=stop

And Tomcat72 instance with cmd:

tomcat7 //IS//Tomcat71 –DisplayName="Apache Tomcat 7" ^
     –Install="D:\Tomcat\Tomcat_Instance-2\bin\tomcat7.exe" –Jvm=auto ^
     –StartMode=jvm –StopMode=jvm ^
     –StartClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap –StartParams=start ^
     –StopClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap –StopParams=stop

I've tried multiplet imes to Add and remove the Tomcat71 and Tomcat72 Windows service names (with) Tomcat DS (Delete Service)

tomcat7 //DS/Tomcat71
tomcat7 //DS/Tomcat72

And strangely the two instances were continuously crashing when I tried to start them (with Properties button and Start instruction) from Windows Task Manager (taskmgr.exe) -> Services

Finally I realized the issue is caused by some problems that somehow occured with Windows Service Names Tomcat71 and Tomcat72 by simply readding the two instances under another name the instances stopped crashing and all worked thanks to help of colleague Anatoliy who pointed me tot he problem by trying to install his own instances under a different service name).

Thanks God finally the 2 instances run fine !

Tags: Apache Tomcat Server, archive files, Connector Port, Environment Variables, installation, one time, Redirect Port, Shutdown Port, startup, windows command
Posted in Everyday Life, Java, System Administration, Tomcat, Various, Web and CMS, Windows | 1 Comment »

How to show country flag, web browser type and Operating System in WordPress Comments

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

!!! IMPORTANT UPDATE COMMENT INFO DETECTOR IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED (IS OBSOLETE) AND THE COUNTRY FLAGS AND OPERATING SYSTEM WILL BE NOT SHOWING INSTEAD,

!!!! TO MAKE THE COUNTRY FLAGS AND OS WP FUNCTIONALITY WORK AGAIN YOU WILL NEED TO INSTALL WP-USERAGENT !!!

I've come across a nice WordPress plugin that displays country flag, operating system and web browser used in each of posted comments blog comments.
Its really nice plugin, since it adds some transperancy and colorfulness to each of blog comments 😉
here is a screenshot of my blog with Comments Info Detector "in action":

Comments Info Detector as of time of writting is at stable ver 1.0.5.
The plugin installation and configuration is very easy as with most other WP plugins. To install the plugin;

1. Download and unzip Comments Info Detector

linux:/var/www/blog:# cd wp-content/plugins linux:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins:# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/comment-info-detector.zip ... linux:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins:# unzip comment-info-detector.zip ...

Just for the sake of preservation of history, I've made a mirror of comments-info-detector 1.0.5 wp plugin for download here
2. Activate Comment-Info-Detector

To enable the plugin Navigate to;
Plugins -> Inactive -> Comment Info Detector (Activate)

After having enabled the plugin as a last 3rd step it has to be configured.

3. Configure comment-info-detector wp plugin

By default the plugin is disabled. To change it to enabled (configure it) by navigating to:

Settings -> Comments Info Detector

Next a a page will appear with variout fields and web forms, where stuff can be changed. Here almost all of it should be left as it is the only change should be in the drop down menus near the end of the page:

Display Country Flags Automatically (Change No to Yes) Display Web Browsers and OS Automatically (Change No to Yes

After the two menus are set to "Yes" and pressing on Save Changes the plugin is enabled it will immediately start showing information inside each comment the GeoIP country location flag of the person who commented as well as OS type and Web Browser 🙂

Tags: action, Auto, blog, Browsers, change, Comment, Comments, configured, country flag, country location, Detector, Display, downloads, Draft, drop, drop down menus, flag web, How to, Inactive, information, installation, Linux, location, mirror, operating system, os type, page, person, plugin, plugin installation, quot, sake, Save Changes, screenshot, show, Stable, time, transperancy, type, unzip, web browser type, web browsers, web forms, wget, Wordpress, Wordpress Comments, writting, www, zip linux
Posted in Web and CMS, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Check Windows Operating System install date, Full list of installed and uninstalled programs from command line / Check how old is your Windows installation?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2016

when-was-windows-installed-check-howto-from-command-line
Sometimes when you have some inherited Windows / Linux OS servers or Desktops, it is useful to be aware what is the Operating System install date. Usually the install date of the OS is closely to the date of purchase of the system this is especially true for Windows but not necessery true for Liunx based installs.

Knowing the install date is useful especially if you're not sure how outdated is a certain operating system. Knowing how long ago a current installation was performed could give you some hints on whether to create a re-install plans in order to keep system security up2date and could give you an idea whether the system is prone to some common errors of the time of installation or security flaws.

1. Check out how old is Windows install?

Finding out the age of WIndows installation can be performed across almost all NT 4.0 based Windowses and onwards, getting Winblows install date is obtained same way on both Windows XP / Vista/ 7 and 8.

Besides many useful things such as detailed information about the configuration of your PC / notebook systeminfo could also provide you with install date, to do so just run from command line (cmd.exe).

C:\Users\hipo> systeminfo | find /i "install date"
Original Install Date: 09/18/13, 15:23:18 PM

If you need to get the initial Windows system install date however it might be much better to use WMIC command to get the info:

C:\Users\hipo>WMIC OS GET installdate
InstallDate
20130918152318.000000+180

The only downside of using WMIC as you can see is it provides the Windows OS install date in a raw unparsed format, but for scripters that's great.

2. Check WIndows Installed and Uinstalled software and uptime from command line

One common other thing next to Windows install date is what is the Windows uptime, the easiest way to get that is to run Task Manager in command line run taskmgr

For those who want to get the uptime from windows command line for scripting purposes, this can be done again with systeminfo cmd, i.e.:

C:\> systeminfo | find "System Boot Time:"
System Boot Time: 03/29/16, 08:48:59 AM

Other helpful Windows command liners you might want to find out about is getting all the Uninstalled and Installed programs from command line this again is done with WMIC

C:\> wmic /OUTPUT:my_software.txt product get name

Alternative way to get a full list of installed software on Windows OS is to use Microsoft/SysInternals psinfo command:

C:\> psinfo -s > software.txt
C:\> psinfo -s -c > software.csv

If you need to get a complete list of Uinstalled Software using command line (e.g. for batch scripting) purposes, you can query that from Windows registry, like so:

C:\>reg query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Command Output will be something like on below shot:

Well that's all folks 🙂

Tags: check install date and time windows, check install programs command windows, check uninstall programs command win, Check Windows Linux Operating System, Check Windows Operating System, command check uptime windows, common, exe, information, installation, installed programs windows command, line, need, run, scripting, system security, uninstall software windows get, windows command, WMIC
Posted in Curious Facts, Everyday Life, Remote System Administration, System Administration, Various, Windows | No Comments »

Install simscan on Qmail for better Mail server performance and get around unexisting suid perl in newer Linux Debian / Ubuntu servers

Tuesday, August 18th, 2015

qmail-fixing-clamdscan-errors-and-qq-errors-qmail-binary-migration-few-things-to-check-out clamav_logo-installing-clamav-antivirus-to-scan-periodically-debian-server-websites-for-viruses

I've been stuck with qmail-scanner-queue for a while on each and every new Qmail Mail server installation, I've done, this time it was not different but as time evolves and Qmail and Qmail Scanner Wrapper are not regularly updated it is getting, harder and harder to make a fully functional Qmail on newer Linux server distribution releases.

I know many would argue QMAIL is already obsolete but still I have plenty of old servers running QMAIL whose migration might cause more troubles than just continuing to use QMAIL. Moreover QMAIL once set-upped works like a charm.

I've been recently experiencing severe issues with clamdscan errors and I tried to work around this with compiling and using a suid wrapper, however still the clamdscan errors continued and as qmail-scanner is not actively developed and it is much slower than simscan, I've finally decided to give simscan as a mean to fix the clamdscan errors and thanksfully this worked as a solution.

Here is what I did "rawly" to make simscan work on this install:

Make sure simscan is properly installed on Debian Linux 7 or Ubuntu servers and probably (should work) on other Deb based Linuxes by following below steps:

a) Configure simscan with following compile time options as root (superuser)

./configure \
–enable-user=qscand \
–enable-clamav \
–enable-clamdscan=/usr/local/bin/clamdscan \
–enable-custom-smtp-reject=y \
–enable-per-domain=y \
–enable-attach=y \
–enable-dropmsg=n \
–enable-spam=y \
–enable-spam-hits=5 \
–enable-spam-passthru=y \
–enable-qmail-queue=/var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue \
–enable-ripmime=/usr/local/bin/ripmime \
–enable-sigtool-path=/usr/local/bin/sigtool \
–enable-received=y

b) Compile it

make && make install-strip

c) Fix any wrong permissions of simscan queue directory

chmod g+s /var/qmail/simscan/

chown -R qscand:qscand /var/qmail/simscan/
chmod -R 777 simscan/chown -R qscand:qscand simscan/
chown -R qscand:qscand simscan/

d) Add some additional simscan options (how simscan is how to perform scans)

The restart qmail to make mailserver start using simscan instead of qmail-scanner, run below command (again as root):

echo ":clam=yes,spam=yes,spam_hits=8.5,attach=.vbs:.lnk:.scr:.wsh:.hta:.pif" > /var/qmail/control/simcontrol

e) Run /var/qmail/bin/simscanmk in order to convert /var/qmail/control/simcontrol into the /var/qmail/control/simcontrol.cdb database

/var/qmail/bin/simscanmk
/var/qmail/bin/simscanmk -g

f) Modify /service/qmail-smtpd/run to set simscan to be default Antivirus Wrapper Scanner

vim /service/qmail-smtpd/run

I'm using thibs's run script so I've uncommented the line there:

QMAILQUEUE="$VQ/bin/simscan"

Below two lines should stay commented as qmail-scanner is no longer used:

##QMAILQUEUE="$VQ/bin/qmail-scanner-queue"
##QMAILQUEUE="$VQ/bin/qmail-scanner-queue.pl"
export QMAILQUEUE

qmailctl restart
* Stopping qmail-smtpdssl.
* Stopping qmail-smtpd.
* Sending qmail-send SIGTERM and restarting.
* Restarting qmail-smtpd.
* Restarting qmail-smtpdssl.

g) Test whether simscan is properly sending / receiving emails:

echo "Testing Email" >> /tmp/mailtest.txt
env QMAILQUEUE=/var/qmail/bin/simscan SIMSCAN_DEBUG=3 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject hipo@my-mailserver.com < /tmp/mailtest.txt

Besides that as I'm using qscand:qscand as a user for my overall Qmail Thibs install I had to also do:

chown -R qscand:qscand /var/qmail/simscan/
chmod -R 777 simscan/
chown -R qscand:qscand simscan/

It might be a good idea to also place that lines in /etc/rc.local to auto change permissions on Linux boot, just in case something wents wrong with permissions.

Yeah, I know 777 is unsecure but without this permissions, I was still getting errors, plus the server doesn't have any accounts except the administrator, so I do not worry other system users might sniff on email 🙂

h) Test whether Qmail mail server send / receives fine with simscan

After that I've used another mail server with mail command to test whether mail is received:

mail -s "testing email1234" hipo@new-configured-qmail-server.com
asdfadsf
.
Cc:

Then it is necessery to also install latest clamav daemon from source in my case that's on Debian GNU / Linux 7, because somehow the Debian shipped binary version of clamav 0.98.5+dfsg-0+deb7u2 does fail to scan any incoming or outgoing email with error:

clamdscan: corrupt or unknown clamd scanner error or memory/resource/perms problem – exit status -1/72057594037927935

So to fix it you will have to install clamav on Debian Linux from source.

Voilla, that's all finally it worked !

Tags: bin, binary version, installation, Linux Debian Ubuntu, mail command, make, performance, QMAILQUEUE, script, simscan, Stopping, system users, test, Testing Email, time, var, work
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Qmail, Remote System Administration, System Administration | 3 Comments »

How to renew self signed QMAIL toaster and QMAIL rocks expired SSL pem certificate

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

qmail_toaster_logo-fix-qmail-rocks-expired-ssl-pem-certificate

One of the QMAIL server installs, I have installed very long time ago. I've been notified by clients, that the certificate of the mail server has expired and therefore I had to quickly renew the certificate.

This qmail installation, SSL certificates were located in /var/qmail/control under the names servercert.key and cervercert.pem

Renewing the certificates with a new self signed ones is pretty straight forward, to renew them I had to issue the following commands:

1. Generate servercert encoded key with 1024 bit encoding

debian:~# cd /var/qmail/control debian:/var/qmail/control# openssl genrsa -des3 -out servercert.key.enc 1024 Generating RSA private key, 1024 bit long modulus ...........++++++ .........++++++ e is 65537 (0x10001) Enter pass phrase for servercert.key.enc: Verifying - Enter pass phrase for servercert.key.enc:

In the Enter pass phrase for servercert.key.enc I typed twice my encoded key password, any password is good, here though using a stronger one is better.

2. Generate the servercert.key file

debian:/var/qmail/control# openssl rsa -in servercert.key.enc -out servercert.key Enter pass phrase for servercert.key.enc: writing RSA key

3. Generate the certificate request

debian:/var/qmail/control# openssl req -new -key servercert.key -out servercert.csr debian:/var/qmail/control# openssl rsa -in servercert.key.enc -out servercert.key Enter pass phrase for servercert.key.enc:writing RSA key root@soccerfame:/var/qmail/control# openssl req -new -key servercert.key -out servercert.csr You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:UK State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:London Locality Name (eg, city) []:London Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:My Company Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:My Org Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []: Email Address []:admin@adminmail.com

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

In the above prompts its necessery to fill in the company name and location, as each of the prompts clearly states.

4. Sign the just generated certificate request

debian:/var/qmail/control# openssl x509 -req -days 9999 -in servercert.csr -signkey servercert.key -out servercert.crt

Notice the option -days 9999 this option instructs the newly generated self signed certificate to be valid for 9999 days which is quite a long time, the reason why the previous generated self signed certificate expired was that it was built for only 365 days

5. Fix the newly generated servercert.pem permissions debian:~# cd /var/qmail/control debian:/var/qmail/control# chmod 640 servercert.pem debian:/var/qmail/control# chown vpopmail:vchkpw servercert.pem debian:/var/qmail/control# cp -f servercert.pem clientcert.pem debian:/var/qmail/control# chown root:qmail clientcert.pem debian:/var/qmail/control# chmod 640 clientcert.pem

Finally to load the new certificate, restart of qmail is required:

6. Restart qmail server

debian:/var/qmail/control# qmailctl restart Restarting qmail: * Stopping qmail-smtpd. * Sending qmail-send SIGTERM and restarting. * Restarting qmail-smtpd.

Test the newly installed certificate

To test the newly installed SSL certificate use the following commands:

debian:~# openssl s_client -crlf -connect localhost:465 -quiet depth=0 /C=UK/ST=London/L=London/O=My Org/OU=My Company/emailAddress=admin@adminmail.com verify error:num=18:self signed certificate verify return:1 ... debian:~# openssl s_client -starttls smtp -crlf -connect localhost:25 -quiet depth=0 /C=UK/ST=London/L=London/O=My Org/OU=My Company/emailAddress=admin@adminmail.com verify error:num=18:self signed certificate verify return:1 250 AUTH LOGIN PLAIN CRAM-MD5 ...

If an error is returned like 32943:error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol:s23_clnt.c:607: this means that SSL variable in the qmail-smtpdssl/run script is set to 0.

To solve this error, change SSL=0 to SSL=1 in /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpdssl/run and do qmailctl restart

The error verify return:1 displayed is perfectly fine and it's more of a warning than an error as it just reports the certificate is self signed.

Tags: bit, certificate, certificate request, Certificates, client, com, control, csr, csropenssl, des3, Distinguished, distinguished name, dn, file, genrsa, How to, information, installation, key, key file, keyroot, localhost, long time, mail server, modulus, nam, openssl, option, password, pem, phrase, private key, province name, qmail installation, qmailctl, request, Restart, rocks, root, RSA, self, soccerfame, time, toaster, var
Posted in Linux, Qmail, System Administration, Various | 2 Comments »

How to migrate vpopmail multiple servers (mail accounts) to single vpopmail (qmail) install

Friday, October 21st, 2011

I needed to migrate vpopmail/domains multiple directories stored on 2 servers to a single vpopmail install.
Merging the two vpopmails user Maildir/ stored accounts actually actually was quite simple, though it needed a bit of tweaks.

Here is how I migrated the two vpopmail installations to reside on the one vpopmail mail storage.

1. I used tar to archive the two vpopmail installations on the two different

First I logged in with root over ssh on the first node, e.g.:

qmail-server1:~# cd /home/vpopmail/ qmail-server1:/home/vpopmail# ionice -c 3 tar -czvf vpopmail1_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz domains/ ...

Then logged in on the second machine:

qmail-server2:~# cd /home/vpopmail qmail-server2:/home/vpopmail# ionice -c 3 tar -czvf vpopmail2_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz domains/

I used ionice -c 3 which instructs the tar archive of vpopmail directory to be created using idle (sparing the hard disk) from I/O overheads.

Sometimes not using ionice especially the case where hundreds of mail domains exist in domains/ could overload the server and stop the qmail and even sometimes ssh from properly responding for a very long periods as well as delaying the work of the mail server and failure to accept some user connections to pop3 or smtp protocols.I found out about the exisnte of ionice command just recently, reading some blog online. The command is absolute "must use", always when have to archive directories with tens of thousands of files and subdirectories. It's also nice in general, also on some copy or move operations on GNU / Linux, ionice is truly great.

Anyways after a while I had my both archives on both servers existing, so I used sftp (one can use scp as well) to transfer the archives to the newly configured qmail + vpopmail installation.

2. Use sftp or scp to copy the archives to the new configured vpopmail server

Again on both servers I had to execute, sftp I prefer sftp as I love being interactive on the shell 😉

qmail-server1:/home/vpopmail# sftp root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com Password: Connected to my-vpopmail-server-host.com. sftp> cd /home/vpopmail sftp> put vpopmail1_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz ... sftp> exit

Once again the same commands has to be issued on the second vpomail server, where the second domains/ mail accounts archive was just made:

qmail-server2:/home/vpopmail# sftp root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com Password: Connected to my-vpopmail-server-host.com. sftp> cd /home/vpopmail sftp> put vpopmail2_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz ... sftp> exit

Now as both of the archives are uploaded, next step is to login to the root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com server, where the two archives were just uploaded:

qmail-server1:/var/domains# ssh root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com my-vpopmal-server-host:~# cd /home/vpopmailmy-vpopmail-server-host:/home/vpopmail# tar -zxvf vpopmail1_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz domains/ ...

Next on, the second vpopmail2_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz is untarred:

3. Unarchive the uploaded vpopmail*.tar.gz archives

my-vpopmail-server-host:/home/vpopmail# tar -zxvf vpopmail2_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz domains/ ...

Now, if the two archives are properly tarred and no errors are returned (that was my case thx God).
4. Use a shell script to generate a script, to later change all user emails passwords on the my-vpopmail-server-host.com

The next thing which has to be done is that all email accounts with passwords are recreated with vpopmail's /home/vpopmail/bin/vpasswd command. Even though the domains are existing with the respective vpasswd and vpasswd.cdb in each mailbox on the new server my-vpopmail-server-host still the mailboxes were not visible by vpopmail. To make all the mailboxes with the correct passwords be responding on the new vpopmail connections via IMAP and POP3 mail fetch protocols, I wrote a small script which does change the passwords of all mailboxes just transferred from the two servers to my-vpopmail-server-host

The script is very simple and actually is not too automated, but at least it works. I've called my script to dump all the user passwords for all the vpopmail filesystem existing mail domains dump_vpopmail_mail_passwords.sh

To use the script its necessery that the script is downloaded on both the vpopmail mail servers from which domains/ directory is migrated, e.g.:

qmail-server1:/home/vpopmail# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/dump_vpopmail_mail_passwords.sh ... qmail-server1:/home/vpopmail# sh dump_vpopmail_mail_passwords.sh >> change_mail_account_pwds.sh

Same procedure goes on the second vpopmail server qmail-server2:

qmail-server2:/home/vpopmail# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/dump_vpopmail_mail_passwords.sh ... qmail-server2:/home/vpopmail# sh dump_vpopmail_mail_passwords.sh >> change_mail_account_pwds.sh

5. Upload the change_mail_accounts_pwds.sh shell script created on the two qmail mail servers to dump_vpopmail_mail_passwords.sh

Again I used sftp to upload the two change_mail_account_pwds.sh bash scripts:
qmail-server1:/home/vpopmail# sftp root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com Password: Connected to my-vpopmail-server-host.com. sftp> put change_mail_account_pwds.sh change_mail_account_pwds1.sh ... sftp> exit sftp>

qmail-serve2:/home/vpopmail# sftp root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com Password: Connected to my-vpopmail-server-host.com. sftp> put change_mail_account_pwds.sh change_mail_account_pwds2.sh ... sftp> exit

6. Execute change_mail_account_pwds1.sh and change_mail_account_pwds2.sh on my-vpopmail-server-host.com

On the 3rd server where the two vpopmail domains are migrated my-vpopmail-server-host.com , from /home/vpopmail invoke the above two scripts:

root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com:/home/vpopmail# sh change_mail_account_pwds1.sh root@my-vpopmail-server-host.com:/home/vpopmail# sh change_mail_account_pwds2.sh

The two scripts will contain list with all the two migrated vpopmail user mail addresses in a format similar to:

vpasswd mail_account@mail-domain.com password1 vpasswd mail_account1@mail-domain.com some_password vpasswd mail_accountX@mail-domain.com other_password etc..

After following this steps, all the mail accounts (or most of them ;)) should be merged from the two servers on the new configured vpopmail on my-vpopmail-server-host.com host.

The up-described procedure could be literally followed with migratingm any number of vpopmail /home/vpopmail/domains user email accounts.

If it has to be mass deployed based, its coparatively easy even to write an automated script to do the various aforementioned steps without any user interaction.

I've seen also some other explanations on how to migrate qmail.jsm1.net , but honestly was too lazy to read them, so I just came up with the ways described here.
One important note to make here is always to make backups, this steps worked for me but I can't guarantee this migration tutorial will work at all. I hope this helps somebody out there. Cheers 😉

Tags: archive directories, cd home, change, com, command, comPassword, configured, copy, czvf, Disk, email accounts, failure, gnu linux, gz, hard disk, How to, installation, login, long periods, mail accounts, mail domains, mail server, mail storage, move, node, pop, protocols, quot, root, scp, script, servers, sftp, Shell, smtp, ssh, tar archive, tar gz, tens of thousands, thx, tweaks, vpomail, vpopmail, wget, work
Posted in Linux, Qmail, System Administration, Various | 1 Comment »

Non-free packages to install to make Ubuntu Linux Multimedia ready / Post install packages for new Ubuntu installations

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

1. Add Medibuntu package repository

root@ubuntu:~# wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list \ http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \ && apt-get --quiet update \ && apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring \ && apt-get --quiet update
2. Enable Ubuntu to play Restricted DVD
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install --yes libdvdread4 ... root@ubuntu:~# /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

After that VLC will be ready to play DVDs for some programs which was compiled without DVD, source rebuilt is required.

If DVDs hang you might need to set a Region Code with regionset:

# regionset

3. Install non-free codecs

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install non-free-codecs

4. Install Chromium ffmpeg nonfree codecs

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install chromium root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree

5. Install w32codecs / w64codecs

Depending on the Ubuntu Linux installation architecture 32/64 bit install w32codecs or w64codecs

For 32 bit (x86) Ubuntu install w32codecs:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install w32codecs

For 64 bit arch Ubuntu:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install w64codecs

6. Install ubuntu-restricted-extras meta package

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

7. Install cheese for webcam picture/video snapshotting

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install cheese

8. Install GIMP, Inkscape, xsane,sane, shotwell etc.

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get --yes install sane xsane gimp inkscape gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-registry \ blender gcolor2 showtwell bluefish kompozer

9. Install multimedia Sound & Video utilities

Install Subtitle editor, video editiking , sound editing, mp3 player, iso mounters, DVD/CD Burners

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install rhythmbox banshee smplayer mplayer \ realplayer audacity brasero jokosher istanbuk gtk-recordMyDesktop \acetoneisohexedit furiusisomount winff fala audacious dvdstyler lives hydrogen subtitleeditor gnome-subtitles electricsheep k3b

10. Install CD / DVD RIP tools

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install acidrip sound-juicer ogmrip thoggen
11. Install chat messanger programs, Browsers, mail pop3 clients, torrent, emulators, ftp clients etc.

apt-get install seamonkey thunderbird transmission transmission-gtk gbgoffice kbedic \ pidgin openoffice.org gxine mozilla-plugin-vlc wine dosbox samba filezilla amsn ntp \epiphany-browser ntpdate desktop-webmail alltray chmsee gftp xchat-gnome ghex \gnome-genius bleachbit arista

12. Install Non-Free Flash Player

Unfortunately Gnash is not yet production ready and crashes in many websites …

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound swfdec-gnome

13. Install Archive / Unarchive management programs

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install unace unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils rar uudeview \ mpack lha arj cabextract file-roller

15. Install VirtualBox and QEmu

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install qemu-launcher qemu-kvm-extras virtualbox virtualbox-ose \ virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms

This should be enough to use Ubuntu normally for multimedia Desktop just as MS Windows for most of the daily activities.
Am I missing some important program?

Tags: amp, architecture, audacity, Auto, banshee, bit, blender, bluefish, cd burners, Chromium, Draft, editing, editing mp3, ffmpeg, free codecs, gcolor, inkscape, Install, installation, ISO, libdvdread, Linux, linux multimedia, list, lsb, Medibuntu, meta package, org, output document, package, player, plugin registry, regionset, repository, root, sane, shafter, shotwell, showtwell, smplayer, Sound, sound editing, Sound Video, subtitle editor, sudo, Ubuntu, ubuntu linux, Ubuntu Linux Multimedia, video, video utilities, VirtualBox, VLC, wget, WinFF, x86
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, System Administration | 4 Comments »

How to install and configure djbdns from source as a Cachening Localhost Proxy resolver to increase resolving efficiency on Debian 6 Squeeze

Monday, August 1st, 2011

It seems DjbDNS on Debian Squeeze has been not included as a Debian package. There is still possibility to install djbdns from an older deb package or install it from source. I however decided to install it from source as finding the old Debian package for Lenny and Etch takes time, plus I'm running an amd64 version of Debian and this might even more complicate the situation.
Installing it from source is not really a Debian way but at least it works.

In this article I assume that daemontools and ucspi-tcp are preliminary installed, if not one needs to install them with:

debian:~# apt-get install ucspi-tcp daemontools daemontools-run ...

The above two ones are required as DJBDNS is originally made to run through djb's daemontools.

Here is the exact step I took to have it installed as local caching DNS server on a Debian Squeeze server:

1. Download and untar DjbDNS

debian:~# wget -q http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/djbdns-1.05.tar.gz debian:~# tar -zxvvf djbdns-1.05.tar.gz ...

2. Add DjbDNS users to /etc/passwd

Creating the below two users is not arbitrary but it's recommendable.

echo 'dnscache:*:54321:54321:dnscache:/dev/null:/dev/null' >> /etc/passwd echo 'dnslog:*:54322:54322:dnslog:/dev/null:/dev/null' >> /etc/passwd

3. Compile DJBDNS nameserver

First it's necessery to use the below echo command to work around a common Linux bug:

debian:~# cd djbdns-1.05 debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# echo gcc -O2 -include /usr/include/errno.h > conf-cc

Next let's make it:

debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# make

4. Install the compiled djbdns binaries

debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# make setup check # here comes some long install related output

If no errors are produced by make setup check this means that the djbdns should have installed itself fine.

As installation is compileted it's a good idea to report about the newly installed DjbDNS server if running a mail server. This info is used by Dan Bernstein to gather statistical data about the number of installations of djbdns servers throughout the world.

5. Do some general configurations to the newly installed DJBDNS

Now let's copy the list of the IP addresses of the global DNS root servers in /etc/.

debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# cp -rpf dnsroots.global /etc/ debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# ./dnscache-conf dnscache dnslog /etc/dnscache 0.0.0.0

dnscache-conf will generate some default configuration files for djbdns in /etc/dnscache

Next allow the networks which should be able to use the just installed djbdns server as a caching server:

debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# cd /etc/dnscache/root/ip debian:/etc/dnscache/root# touch 192.168.1 debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# touch 123.123

First command will allow all ips in range 192.168.1.* to be able to access the DNS server and the second command will allow all ips from 123.123.1-255.1-255 to be able to query the server.

Some further fine tunning can be done from the files:

/etc/dnscache/env/CACHESIZE and /etc/dnscache/env/DATALIMIT

As a last step, before it's running, we have to link the /etc/dnscache to daemontools like so:

debian:/root/djbdns-1.05# ln -sf /etc/dnscache /etc/service/dnscache

If the daemontools is not linked to be accessible via /etc/service it's also a good to link it there:

debian:~# ln -sf /etc/service /

Now the DJBDNS should be running fine, to test if it's running without errors through daemontools I used:

debian:~# ps ax|grep -i readproc 5358 pts/18 R+ 0:00 grep -i readproc 11824 ? S 0:00 readproctitle service errors: ...........

If no errors are displayed it's configured and running to also test if it's capable of resolving I used the host command:

debian:~# host www.pc-freak.net localhost Using domain server: Name: localhost Address: 127.0.0.1#53 Aliases:

www.pc-freak.net has address 83.228.93.76
www.pc-freak.net mail is handled by 0 mail.www.pc-freak.net.

Now the DJBDNS is properly installed and if you test it for a while with time host somehost.com localhost , you will see how quick it is in resolving.

The advantage of running DJBDNS is it does not require almost no maintance, its rock solid and great just like all other Dan Bernstein's written software.
Enjoy 😉

Tags: binaries, Cachening, Cachening Localhost Proxy, Compile, configure, configured, cr, daemontools, dan bern, dan bernstein, deb package, debian cd, debian package, djb, djbdns, DNS, dns server, echo command, efficiency, errno, etc passwd, etch, host, How to, Install, installation, Linux, linux bug, mail server, necessery, package, passwdecho, possibility, root, running, squeeze, statistical data, tar gz, tcp, time, Touch, untar, wget, yp, zxvvf
Posted in Linux, Performance Tuning, System Administration, Web and CMS | 4 Comments »

How to install nginx webserver from source on Debian Linux / Install Latest Nginx on Debian

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Nginx install server logo
If you're running a large website consisting of a mixture of php scripts, images and html. You probably have noticed that using just one Apache server to serve all the content is not that efficient

Each Apache child (I assume you're using Apache mpm prefork consumes approximately (20MB), this means that each client connection would consume 20 mb of your server memory.
This as you can imagine is truly a suicide in terms of memory. Each request for a picture, css or simple html file would ask Apache to fork another process and will consume (20mb of extra memory form your server mem capacity)!.

Taking in consideration all this notes and the need for some efficiency here, the administrator should normally think about dividing the processing of the so called static content from the dynamic content served on the server.

Apache is really a nice webserver software but with all the loaded modules to serve dynamic content, for instance php, cgi, python etc., it's becoming not the best solution for handling a (css, javascript, html, flv, avi, mov etc. files).

Even a plain Apache server installation without (libphp, mod_rewrite mod deflate etc.) is still not dealing efficiently enough with the aforementioned static files content

Here comes the question if Apache is not that quick and efficient in serving static files, what then? The answer is caching webserver! By caching the regular static content files, your website visitors will benefit by experiencing shorter webserver responce files in downloading static contents and therefore will generally hasten your website and improve the end user's experience.

There are plenty of caching servers out there, some are a proprietary software and some are free software.

However the three most popular servers out there for static file content serving are:

Squid,
Varnish
Nginx

In this article as you should have already found out by the article title I'll discuss Nginx

You might ask why exactly Nginx and not some of the other twos, well simply cause Squid is too complicated to configure and on the other hand does provide lower performance than Nginx. On the other hand Varnish is also a good solution for static file webserver, but I believe it is not tested enough. However I should mention that my experience with testing varnish on my own home router is quite good by so far.

If you're further interested into varhisn cache I would suggest you checkout www.varhisn-cache.org .

Now as I have said a few words about squid and varhisn let's proceed to the essence of the article and say few words about nginx

Here is a quote describing nginx in a short and good manner directly extracted from nginx.com

nginx [engine x] is a HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev. It has been running for more than five years on many heavily loaded Russian sites including Rambler (RamblerMedia.com). According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 4.70% busiest sites in April 2010. Here are some of success stories: FastMail.FM, WordPress.com.

By default nginx is available ready to be installed in Debian via apt-get, however sadly enough the version available for install is pretty much outdated as of time of writting the nginx debian version in lenny's deb package repositories is 0.6.32-3+lenny3

This version was release about 2 years ago and is currently completely outdated, therefore I found it is not a good idea to use this old and probably slower release of nginx and I jumped further to install my nginx from source:
Nginx source installation actually is very simple on Linux platforms.

1. As a first step in order to be able to succeed with the install from source make sure your system you have installed the packages:

debian:~# apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libssl-dev zlib1g-dev build-essential

2. Secondly download latest nginx source code tarball

Check out on http://nginx.com/download the latest stable release of nginx and further issue the commands below:

debian:~# cd /usr/local/src debian:/usr/local/src# wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-0.9.6.tar.gz

3.Unarchive nginx source code

debian:/usr/local/src#tar -zxvvf nginx-0.9.6.tar.gz ...

The nginx server requirements for me wasn't any special so I proceeded and used the nginx ./configure script which is found in nginx-0.9.6

4. Compline nginx server

debian:/usr/local/src# cd nginx-0.9.6 debian:/usr/local/src/nginx-0.9.6# ./configure && make && make install + Linux 2.6.26-2-amd64 x86_64 checking for C compiler ... found + using GNU C compiler + gcc version: 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) checking for gcc -pipe switch ... found ... ...

The last lines printed by the nginx configure script are actually the major interesting ones for administration purposes the default complation options in my case were:

Configuration summary + using system PCRE library + OpenSSL library is not used + md5: using system crypto library + sha1 library is not used + using system zlib library

nginx path prefix: "/usr/local/nginx"
nginx binary file: "/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx"
nginx configuration prefix: "/usr/local/nginx/conf"
nginx configuration file: "/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf"
nginx pid file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid"
nginx error log file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/error.log"
nginx http access log file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log"
nginx http client request body temporary files: "client_body_temp"
nginx http proxy temporary files: "proxy_temp"
nginx http fastcgi temporary files: "fastcgi_temp"
nginx http uwsgi temporary files: "uwsgi_temp"
nginx http scgi temporary files: "scgi_temp"

If you want to setup nginx server to support ssl (https) and for instance install nginx to a different server path you can use some ./configure configuration options, for instance:

./configure –sbin-path=/usr/local/sbin –with-http_ssl_module

Now before you can start the nginx server, you should also set up the nginx init script;

5. Download and set a ready to use script with cmd:

debian:~# cd /etc/init.d debian:/etc/init.d# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/nginx-init-script debian:/etc/init.d# mv nginx-init-script nginx debian:/etc/init.d# chmod +x nginx

6. Configure Nginx

Nginx is a really easy and simple server, just like the Russians, Simple but good!
By the way it's interesting to mention nginx has been coded by a Russian, so it's robust and hard as a rock as all the other Russian creations 🙂
Nginx configuration files in a default install as the one in my case are to be found in /usr/local/nginx/conf

In the nginx/conf directory you're about to find the following list of files which concern nginx server configurations:

deiban:/usr/local/nginx:~# ls -1 fastcgi.conf fastcgi.conf.default fastcgi_params fastcgi_params.default koi-utf koi-win mime.types mime.types.default nginx.conf nginx.conf.default scgi_params scgi_params.default uwsgi_params uwsgi_params.default win-utf

The .default files are just a copy of the ones without the .default extension and contain the default respective file directives.

In my case I'm not using fastcgi to serve perl or php scripts via nginx so I don't need to configure the fastcgi.conf and fastcgi_params files, the scgi_params and uwsgi_params conf files are actually files which contain nginx configuration directives concerning the use of nginx to process SSI (Server Side Include) scripts and therefore I skip configuring the SSI conf files.
koi-utf and koi-win are two files which usually you don't need to configure and aims the nginx server to support the UTF-8 character encoding and the mime.types conf is a file which has a number of mime types the nginx server will know how to handle.

Therefore after all being said the only file which needs to configured is nginx.conf

7. Edit /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

debian:/usr/local/nginx:# vim /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

Therein you will find the following default configuration:

#gzip on;

server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;

#charset koi8-r;

#access_log logs/host.access.log main;

location / {
root html;
index index.html index.htm;
}
#error_page 404 /404.html;

# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}

In the default configuration above you need to modify only the above block of code as follows:

server { listen 80; server_name yoursitedomain.com;

#charset koi8-r;

#access_log logs/access.log main;

location / {
root /var/www/yoursitedomain.com/html;
index index.html index.htm;
}

Change the yoursitedomain.com and /var/www/yoursitedomain.com/html with your directory and website destinations.

8. Start nginx server with nginx init script

debian:/usr/local/nginx:# /etc/init.d/nginx start Starting nginx:

This should bring up the nginx server, if something is miss configured you will notice also some error messages, as you can see in my case in above init script output, thanksfully there are no error messages.
Note that you can also start nginx directly via invoking /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx binary

To check if the nginx server has properly started from the command line type:

debian:/usr/local/nginx:~# ps ax|grep -i nginx|grep -v grep 9424 ? Ss 0:00 nginx: master process /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx 9425 ? S 0:00 nginx: worker process

Another way to check if the web browser is ready to serve your website file conten,t you can directly access your website by pointing your browser to with http://yoursitedomain.com/, you should get your either your custom index.html file or the default nginx greeting Welcome to nginx

9. Add nginx server to start up during system boot up

debian:/usr/local/nginx:# /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults

That's all now you have up and running nginx and your static file serving will require you much less system resources, than with Apache.
Hope this article was helpful to somebody, feedback on it is very welcome!

Tags: apache server, article title, best solution, client, cmd, com, command, configure, connection, consideration, content, default configuration, dynamic content, file, flv, form, How to, Install, installation, javascript html, lenny, logs, memory form, mod, mpm, need, php, php scripts, proprietary software, request, responce, script, server apache, server installation, server memory, software, Start, static content, static file, static files, suicide, usr, Varnish, webserver software, website visitors
Posted in Linux, System Administration, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »

☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

Posts Tagged ‘installation’

Install and Run Multiple Tomcat and JAVA server instances on single Windows server Howto

Check Windows Operating System install date, Full list of installed and uninstalled programs from command line / Check how old is your Windows installation?

Daily Bible quote

GET ARTICLE UPDATES

Useful blog? Help it:

Links to Other Places

Recent Posts

Ads

Categories

About Myself

Recent Comments

Top Post Views

blogtopsites