It’s not often I blog twice in a day, but after seeing this post I just had to see if I could build a rpm for fedora 7.

I’ve updated my repo for fedora 7, so.. yum install weather-wallpaper should do the trick

Edit: Hidden yum transation behind more tag.

A fedora start page is being tested… the original mine looks a little different tho, nothing a quick css update wouldn’t fix

I saw this on planet fedora and thought I’d post it,

GNOME Password Generator is now back as a Fedora package.

Reference: Debarshi’s den - gnome-password-generator@fedoraproject.org

It’ll be nice to have an alternative to this perfect password generator as we’re not always online are we

I after installing Fedora7 I thought I’d take a look at the stats the project had gathered, I saw some centos devices, but couldn’t find a rpm.

I’ve had a go at building one, it mostly works (this is my nagios box), it’s a rebuild of the f7 source, I have to frig about with the spec file, so I’ve published my source rpm here, search for Nick in the .spec file, you’ll see my bodge.

The smolt rpms are in my yum repo, feel free to download the packages and have a go.

• smolt-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm
• smolt-firstboot-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm

I was doing some testing on my server the other day, and realised that http compression within apache (httpd) was not enabled by default. Further digging showed me that mod_defate was what I needed, and infact it was installed by default on my CentOS box.

How to enable mod_default on Centos: Create /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf with the following contents

I’ve been a proud linux counter member (#372709) for sometime now; a few days ago I got some bounce-back error messages..

<machine-registration@gimel.counter.li.org> (expanded from <machine-registration@counter.li.org>): delivery temporarily suspended: connect to gimel.counter.li.org[158.38.152.227]: No route to host</machine-registration@counter.li.org></machine-registration@gimel.counter.li.org>

I didn’t think, much of it at the time, maintenance happens, but today noticed it again, a quick google shows that others have noticed too… I do hope this isn’t the end of what was a great project

Why has it taken me so long to spot this ? Looks like this draft was written on the 13th May, if I hadn’t have been just about to download FC7 then I’d have missed it !

EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
EPEL is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs like CentOS or Scientific Linux.

About time, and thank you redhat/fedora, want fedora extra packages in centos, then install this epel-release .rpm frickin’ sweet !

I’ve taken to using CentOS on my servers, and fedora on my Laptop. New job, means new laptop, and to avoid fedora update hell, I thought I’d try CentOS on my laptop.

All seems good other than my wifi card not being detected, and for some reason googling for “centos 5 intel 3945” didn’t provide a working anserwer, actually I found the answer by googling for “supplementary disk centos 5” which finds this thread that says…

Install dag’s repo (this rpm), and then install dkms-ipw3945 (yum will pick up the dependancies)

yum install dkms-ipw3945

Next enable network manager…

The holy grail of computing is security and performance, it’s all well and good having the most secure system in the world, but if it’s rubbish at doing the job it’s supposed to do then you’ve kinda missed the point. Tools like psad and denyhosts provide excellent security, but to do so actively use resource. Let’s take the example of a mail server, if some unsociable person starts heavily scanning your machine, and the above two applications slow down the delivery of mail, your users won’t be happy. That’s where “nice” comes into effect; nice allows you to add priorities to the applications that are important to you. Now I hear what you’re saying, psad and denyhosts are so light how could they possibly consume resource ? So let’s look at a real world example….

Could that title get any longer !

Hopefully you get the point, sometimes you need different tools for different jobs, if you want a full development platform with SVN support I suggest you take a look at eclipse (with subclipse ) but what if you already have done the development and you just want to do a quick upload.

My phpbb_recent_topics plugin is hosted here, and when the nice guys at wordpress gave me an svn account, I just wanted a quick way to upload what I’ve done. Now I must stress this may not be the “proper” way to use svn (there’s a book for that) but it is enough to achieve what we want, a straight forward upload.

Whilst doing some routine maintenance, I noticed that I never published the rkhunter rpm I built, the software is officially supported at rootkit.nl but for ease I wanted a yum available rpm

Following a request I’ve rebuilt a later tripwire rpm (2.4.1.1); I think at this point it would be prudent to point out that the rpms found here are not maintained, and I do not offer any kind of support - you use them at your own risk - but you’re welcome to make requests !

tripwire-2.4.1.1-1.i386.rpm

My Yum repo has also been updated, config file here

If you look after a remote linux box, the chances are you use SSH, in order to connect to it you may even have to leave PORT 22 open to the whole Internet !

There are some basic security steps that you can do to protect SSH, such as block the root user from logging in, and force users to use STRONG authentication.

Wordpress like many web applications relies on apache (or something else) to serve the HTTP pages and mysql to store the data. Your wordpress website is important to you, so you need an external monitoring system to let you know what’s going on.

Nagios is a great, enterprise class, open-source monitoring application; and what you need do is configure it to exactly represent how wordpress works; if you can get that right you can immediately get notified if any piece of the puzzle fails.

A couple of weeks ago, I was proper ill with flu; the problem with looking after your own server is that only you can fix it - it’s well and good having monitoring systems (nagios) telling you about faults, but if you can’t read or see the alerts the fault won’t get resolved.

During this time I was ill, for an unknown reason the mySQL process on my server died, as such my website (and others I look after) were down for 8 hours. The fix was simple, one command, restart the service and normal service was resumed (excuse the pun).