A Few Fixes

I had to make some minor fixes.

The first was with my NTP server. The TimeServer I was syncing with was off or never really there to begin with. In the end up have my ntp.conf file set as follows:

server nist1-ny.ustiming.org #Server syncing with
restrict nist1-ny.ustiming.org mask 255.255.255.255 nomodify notrap noquery #do not allow modify or query my server
restrict 192.168.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 notrust nomodify notrap #allow people on my network to sync up
restrict 127.0.0.1 #give my system full access
driftfile /var/db/ntp.drift

The other error I was getting during the launch of Alpine

directory /var/mail must have 1777 protection

What I ended up doing was a chmod 1777 /var/mail and the issue went away. I did a check send/receive and I didn’t end up breaking anything.

Unexpected Work

The last of the switch over from Comcast Residential to Business was completed Monday. Even though it was completed a few weeks ago. Huh?

Well, apparently the residential side closed my account, which I was assured several times, no email would be lost. I was informed by my wife that her email hadn’t been working since Sunday, even though Internet was. So Monday night, I quickly installed Qpopper on my server, which required minimal configuration. Since my firewall is blocking all but a few ports, I didn’t bother using TLS to secure it. At a later date I will probably change that.

You can grab it here:

http://www.eudora.com/products/unsupported/qpopper/

After telling everyone what her new email was, the Internet went down. Comcast Residential came out and disconnected the cable from the box. Thankfully the Comcast Business technical support was nice and sent someone out the next day. Don’t worry if you are confused, because I’m confused on what happened, but either way as of now everything is all set.

Now that my wife is using my email server on a permanent basis I had to fix a few nagging problems. The first was her email hanging out in her outbox. Turns out, my reverse DNS zone files were not configured correctly. Plus, the resolve.conf file needed to be fixed. The first DNS server listed was my loop-back address, so I changed that IP to the actual IP address of the server. That fixed my SSH remoting in problem and the slowness of Alpine opening up. Normally when trying to connect via SSH or using Alpine there was a 10 second delay. Now it is near instantaneous.

After fixing the zone files and restarting Sendmail, the emails are now flying out of the outbox on my wifes computer. Nothing like unexpected work, but all part of the IT world.

Virtualbox Upgrade

So I’ve been prompted a few times now over the last month or two that an upgrade was available for Sun’s VirtualBox.

Inside the upgrade message prompt there was a link to download the file for install. After downloading the file, I tried to double click the file to get it to install, but I kept getting an error message saying that it couldn’t install. Apparently the correct (or the one that worked for me at least) procedure was as follows:

- Add the following link to your software source in Ubuntu http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian
– Then run this command “wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -“
– The last step was “sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.1“

Not sure if it will be the same procedure the next time an upgrade is available, but for now, this worked. You will see messages saying that it is uninstalling, but I didn’t have a problem with it the uninstall removing my existing Virtual machines.

More information can be found here:

http://www.virtualbox.de/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Router Failure

Apparently my router has given up the ghost. After making my website live (no not this one), the router I was using was crashing around every thirty minutes. This caused some major problems with my wife’s VPN connection work of course. Doing wireless, port forwarding and hard-wired routing was to much for it. I’m actually kind of surprised really, I didn’t think that was to much to do. At any rate the Dlink Xtreme gaming router I bought is finished.

Thankfully I had a 2Wire in the house and managed to get that up and running in about 30 minutes or so. Right now the connection has been much more stable and actually, I liked the interface it had for doing firewall/port forwarding much better then the Dlink.

I did try and search the Internet for a small business router that didn’t cost thousands and had a built in fan, but with no luck. What I think was happening was that the Dlink was overheating. Once I had the 2wire up, my wife noticed a huge increase in speed through her wireless connection. With luck this router will stay stable. Maybe tonight I can start the Gentoo configuration!

Next Project

My next project appears to be the reverse proxy server. Part of me wanted to get rolling on a cool internal music server, but I have two things I want to do first. The reverse proxy of course, but I want to move my blog in-house.

With what research I’ve done, it appears that Apache can do this for me. The server I’m going to drop it on? Gentoo:

http://www.gentoo.org/

From what I understand of Gentoo, it should come with essentially nothing. With luck it will run my Apache proxy server with a small footprint on my ESXi server. Everything I need will have to be compiled from source. The hard part will be when a compile fails and I need to figure what package is missing.

My other plan is to host the remaining sites on a Fedora server. Wish me luck.

Major Updates – Going Live

A lot of stuff occurred with my FreeBSD server. The first thing being was that I dropped dealing with Qmail. I didn’t really like the lack of any instructions and how it was actually working. The original guide had me install some odd tools, though they might have been useful, I didn’t like the fact it made a lot of services start at boot time.

In the end I moved on to the “beast”, also known as Sendmail. From what I’ve read Postfix would have been easier, but my days at an ISP showed me the impressiveness (is that a word?) of Sendmail. Interestingly enough, my server is almost identical in set-up that the ISP had. Though granted I won’t be as busy.

Sendmail was a beast (which I knew it would be) to configure. A couple of things with Sendmail. If you install FreeBSD 7.2, you get Sendmail out of the box. One thing I did learn was that in /etc/mail there are .MC files that hold your master configuration. A command is used to create the .CF file that Sendmail will read. There are plenty of sites out there that talk about how to do this, but this page should give a rough overview on what configuration files you need to work with are.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/sendmail.html

This link will show you some basic configuration stuff to do.

http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/quick/sendmail.html

The next thing that I dropped was Roundcube. I may revisit this product at a later date or another web-mail package, but for now it is out. Part of me thinks is how I configured MySQL and some odd FreeBSD issue. I kept getting a MySQL connection issue. My email program of choice is good ole Pine…err..excuse me, Alpine.

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

I just did a pkg_add via Sysinstall. The main configuration file is in /etc/pine.conf and holds the defaults that are passed to each user. The first time a user launches “alpine” from the command line a .pinerc file is created. In this .pinerc file I edit the full name and the “from” email address. The advantage of Alpine is that it is text based so viruses being set to me are a non issue.

Now that I have a server up and running, then last thing I did was create a base snapshot. This will allow me a nice base to roll back to if the server gets hacked. The main problem will be to find a nice backup solution for my email. But it is just mine, so losing it is a not a big deal. To make a snapshot, log in with the vSphere client, then right click on the running Virtual machine and choose snapshot. Depending on the size, it should take maybe thirty seconds or so.

Beyond that, I don’t think I missed anything I’ve done. So what next? Work and school will be keeping me busy, but I have two things I need to do. A reverse proxy to handle routing of two more sites and a music server to host internally. I have a feeling the reverse proxy is next so I can bring in this blog internally. Stay tuned.

Comcast has come and gone

Comcast has installed my business class service, so I can now legally operate a web server. Overall the install went well. The installer replaced the wire between my location and the pole. Though he did agree to take away my “old” Comcast modem, he forgot to do that. So now I’ve got to find a local shop that I can send it to. He didn’t look like he was feeling to well and I’m not concerned about it.

My only complaint is the lack of any documentation for this modem or any how-to that I’ve found to integrate the IP with my network. I was only given two pieces of information, my IP address and gateway address.

After some digging around online, I did find a “Comcast Business IP Gateway User Guide”. This guide talked about the router a bit and showed me how to connect to it. Looks like it is like my DLink router with a WAN/LAN interface. Plus, it is running its own DHCP server and on a seperate network. I’ll probably change a lot of that over the next few days if not sooner.

When it is completed, I’ll give a bit more of an explanation on how to get this working. Stay tuned.

Holding Pattern

For the moment I am in a bit of wait period. After a month and half, I finally got a contract set-up with Comcast Business services so I can host my own public website without violating a rules. Years back when broadband got popular, the thing a lot of people liked to do was host websites using their residential accounts. To me, I don’t see a big deal. However, Comcast did have an issue with this and were terminating a lot of accounts.

To avoid an account termination and an angry wife without Facebook and email, I ordered the new service. With luck it will be here in January.

Of course, I’m only getting one public IP address. So how will I be able to run multiple webservers on “different” machines? Apparently there are products called “reverse proxy’s”. What does this mean for me? Another virtual host that will pretty much act like a front end server that will pass the requests to the correct webservers.

Not sure what I’ll use to accomplish this, but I’ll probably go with something that is exteremly lightweight and fast.

Stay tuned.

Puppy and server reboots?

So my new puppy loves to flop over and hit the power button on my server, which in turn causes it to reboot. Nothing like being in the middle of a script being edited and then hearing the familiar POST beep.

This brought up an interesting problem. Getting my virtual machines to auto-start when the ESXi loads. To do this, open the vSphere client and do the following:

- Click on the server in the left frame
- Click the configuration tab
- Choose “Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown”
- Click on the VM you want to modify and click on properties.
- Change the VM to be under the Startup order you want. You will see buttons on the right bottom side light up letting you know which option you can choose.

That’s it.

PHP Mailer and info

Just wanted to add two things to the previous post about Apache and PHP. The first is the need for a test PHP script. The one I used is:

<?php phpinfo();?>

Just created a index.php file with the above code. If you see a detailed listing of your PHP settings, then everything worked. If not, then the apache logs could help with resolving the issue.

The next is a mailer PHP script and I found one here:

http://bellonline.co.uk/web-services/free/scripts/php-mailer-script/

The instructions are pretty straight forward so you shouldn’t need to much help configuring it. A quick look at the script didn’t show any weirdness so with luck, it isn’t stealing any passwords.