After emerging MythMusic on my brother’s (soon to be finished) MythTV rig, I got the following error at the end of the run:

* Regenerating GNU info directory index... * Processed 127 info files; 1 errors install-info: No such file or directory for /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

After a little hunting, I was able to find the solution on the Gentoo forums (thread). Basically, it’s just an old symbolic link that is not needed. The solution is to simply unlink it:

# unlink /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

Seems to have worked.

At the last CPLUG meeting, Patrick mentioned that he was hoping to plan a capture the flag (CTF) event sometime in the near future. Although this time there will be no DoS attacks allowed and there will only be one target box, so you shouldn’t have to worry about player vs. player attacks… hopefully. :)

Well, it looks like things are starting to take shape! After an initial post on the mailing list, he has about 13-15 people signed up. The date/time are still TBD, but I know that I’ll be there no matter when it is.

Sounds like fun!

Tonight’s CPLUG meeting topics were Monit and NetReg.

I did the Monit talk and, as far as I could tell, it went pretty well. People seemed to be fairly interested and there were some really good questions/discussion afterward. If you are interested, my presentation slides for my talk are online.

Jason Long covered NetReg which is basically a set of Perl scripts that coordinate your DHCP server with Apache to create a captive portal. Really interesting stuff.

Overall, it was a good meeting.

Update: One of this issues brought up was how to monitor Monit (i.e quis custodiet ipsos custodes?). Jason suggested running Monit from inittab/inetd, which seemed like a decent idea… and one that I was pretty sure I had seen mentioned before. As it turns out, that issue is covered in the Monit FAQ under Question 7.

As I’m sure you know, Congress decided to change when daylight saving time is observed this year claiming that it will reduce energy usage. Well, a side effect of that is that the clocks on my two Gentoo servers were off by an hour today.

In both cases I had to emerge sys-libs/timezone-data-2007c. On my MythTV box, that seemed to fix the time almost immediately. On my other server, it still seemed to be an hour off until I restarted the clock service:

europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart * Caching service dependencies * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service * Stopping bitlbeed * Stopping exim * Stopping syslog-ng * Your TIMEZONE in /etc/conf.d/clock is still set to Factory! * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [Local Time] * Starting syslog-ng * Starting bitlbeed * Starting exim

After all the services came back up, my time seemed to be correct.

Honestly, I haven’t looked into why I had to do that… but I figured I’d pass it along in case it was helpful to anyone else. Enjoy.

It’s that time of year…

Your subscription has been extended to 2007/03/10

Status: Active
Subscription Expires: 2007/03/10
Subscription Plan: Gold

Nice. Zap2it rules.

IBM DeveloperWorks explains how to build a web spider on Linux:

Web spiders are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Using common scripting languages and their collection of Web modules, you can easily develop Web spiders. This article shows you how to build spiders and scrapers for Linux® to crawl a Web site and gather information, stock data, in this case.

Ruby and Python are the languages used.

As I’ve mentioned before, I use Cacti at home to monitor my systems. If you’ve ever used Cacti, you know that the most common way that people poll their systems is using the PHP poller. Well, today I upgraded MySQL on my server (Gentoo) and that apparently broke PHP.

Running the Cacti poller yielded this error:

/usr/bin/php: error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Matt recommended that I re-emerge PHP, which I did. That fixed it. Everything appears to be back up and running.

Quoth Ian at LAMP Training:

We deliver on-site courses throughout the US and worldwide on a range of web technologies, drawing from our personal experience of developing and deploying web-applications, creating web-frameworks, and contributing to open-source software.

Course categories include Web 2.0, Python, Django, and Linux/MySQL/PostgreSQL.

Secure Shell (SSH) is everywhere.

Since it’s inception in 1995, SSH has become the most widespread remote login protocol for Linux boxes, with some estimates saying that there were at least 2 million SSH users at the end of 2000. Gone are the days of telnet sending your data in plaintext over untrusted networks. Now you can type with a reasonable amount of confidence that your data is encrypted and secure.

But, as Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility!

By its very nature, an improperly configured ssh daemon can be a network liability rather than a asset. If you have a Linux box that is accessible via the Internet, it pays to know what you are doing.

Therefore, here are five things you can do to lock down your server and make ssh more secure…

(more…)

After waiting far too long, I finally ordered an extra hard drive to stick in the Dell SC430. It’s a 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 from NewEgg:

europa ~ # hdparm -I /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: ST3320620AS Serial Number: 3QF0LFPW Firmware Revision: 3.AAE Standards: Supported: 7 6 5 4 Likely used: 7 Configuration: Logical max current cylinders 16383 16383 heads 16 16 sectors/track 63 63 -- CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064 LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455 LBA48 user addressable sectors: 625142448 device size with M = 1024*1024: 305245 MB device size with M = 1000*1000: 320072 MB (320 GB)

europa ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: ... 2057.87 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: ... 77.02 MB/sec

Now I can keep all of my media (e.g. mp3s, photos, videos) on that drive, and rsync it to the USB drive enclosure (250GB) that I picked up a while back. That should work as a decent backup system for at home.

I considered running RAID 1 in the server, as it would have been cake to set up. But I wanted a true backup, not just improved availability and hardware fault tolerance. Honestly, I don’t really care about recovery time or availability. However, I care an awful lot about not losing any data. So I’m pretty happy with this setup.