Internet Services from KKoncepts

Recent our CentOS vservers have refused to upgrade the "filesystem" rpm. It gives the error:unpacking of archive failed on file /proc: cpio: chown

Fortunately the fix is easy once you know it. Edit the file "/etc/rpm/macros" inside the guest and add "/proc" to the "%_netsharedpath" line. (Separate entries by a colon.)

So if the line presently says:

%_netsharedpath  /dev:/etc/rc.d/init.d/halt
Change it to say:

%_netsharedpath    /dev:/etc/rc.d/init.d/halt:/proc

Recently I wrote my own start/stop script for our vservers. The "util-vserver" package gives you a little control over the order that the servers are stopped and started, but I wanted to specify the exact order that virtual machines started and stopped in the event of a heartbeat takeover.

If you are running an IPCop firewall (or similar firewall - Debian and Ubuntu you can install this program) and need to check who is taking up all your bandwidth, there is a command line utility in IPCop that will do this for you - iftop

Log into ipcop using ssh as root and run iftop - It is shows the ip address that uses the greatest bandwidth at the moment and since it started. There is no man page in ipcop - you can try this Iftop manual page

The other day - when I was starting up my Kubuntu machine - It reach the Kubuntu logo and starting flashing and not booting. After several reboots, I discovered the problem - I had a key (numeric pad 5) stuck in down position and it was causing the flashing and the inability to boot. Unsticking the key solve the problem.

Ubuntu Lucid comes with Thunderbird 3.0.4 which has to use a beta version of lightning 1.0. lightning 1.0 is not available in the Lucid repository. You have to download the extension from the Thunderbird site:

Soon after installing Windows 7 professional (64-bit) the updates from Microsoft started to fail. Unlike most of the Windows XP and Vista fixes found on the internet, my Windows 7 problem was different. Specifically for Windows 7 the default resolution answer out there, was to call Microsoft. Finally I did some diggin and found on a MS site another thing to try (maybe the third option), was to run the "Readiness Tool". Here is the link to the download....

Being a perl "fan boy" from way back, I have a lot of small perl scripts lying around that I use to look through logs for something specific. We use Cacti and Nagios for "real" monitoring, but I've got scripts to see which email accounts have failed authentication attempts, who's logged into certain services in the past X days, how many connections our email server has rejected based on blacklisting, etc., etc.

One of the things I do quite often is make a clone of a Ubuntu server vdi image that I made in the past so that I can do some testing on a fully setup Ubuntu server image. When the testing is over, I would normally delete this image. Using this clone image, I make a new Virtual Box machine with a bridge network - as I would normally want to access the server from my host machine as a server.

I use VirtualBox when I need to run Windows, and it works beautifully. But today I went to install some Windows software off a CD and discovered that I could no longer connect the CD drive on my laptop to VirtualBox.

I've wanted for some time to create my own custom installer for the Windows OpenVPN client. Up until now we've told clients to download the software and then given them the certificates and configuration files they needed along with instructions on how to install them. But some people still end up unable to use the VPN, which means more support calls for us.