Archive for category Linux
More CS137 setup… stuff
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, School, Sysadmin on November 11, 2012
Because I am feeling accomplished, and because I also want to avoid my physics homework. I think I’ve got a pretty good system working for CS137 (and the UW CS servers) now. I’ve got: sshag working, so I don’t have to eval `ssh-agent` && ssh-add each time I open a new screen session a modified […]
Getting OpenVPN to work on an OpenVZ VPS
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on September 28, 2012
Note: This is a personal VPN, so I just used static keys. A general guide to getting OpenVPN set up is available on the OpenVPN website, but this guide is targeted at CentOS 5 on an OpenVZ VPS. This guide should be usable in other RH derivatives without much (any?) modification; and with slight modifications […]
iptables fun and games
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on September 28, 2012
Note to self: When configuring iptables, don’t copy + paste /sbin/iptables -F /sbin/iptables -P INPUT DROP <bunch of other commands> into bash. I had A Bad Time.
Plesk, Updating CentOS & sftp-server
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on July 6, 2012
tl;dr – Either a plesk update or CentOS update borked an OpenSSHd install such that the sshd_config was pointing to an sftp-server that didn’t exist where it was looking for it, but existed in two other locations. Fix was to update the sshd_config while investigating the possibility of removing the duplicate install.
Cheaping out on EC2 – Downsizing existing EBS volumes
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on June 6, 2012
I’m moving a VM from my own server to EC2. I’ve got $50 worth of credit from a Redhat event, so I would like to make use of that. (That, and my AWS account existed before the free tier was introduced, so I’m not eligible for that.) That said, I want to make that credit […]
Removing bloat from Fedora 17 on EC2
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux on June 6, 2012
I’m in the middle of trialing EC2, and I’m using the official Fedora 17 images kindly provided by the community. They make a great starting point, because I can then install my needed software. Some of which, though, I consider absolutely crucial. So far, I’ve need to install vim, less, rsync and screen. I can […]
Specifying dom0 RAM in Xen – update
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Xen on June 5, 2012
Another thing from the xen-users mailing list: Apparently the way to specify the dom0 RAM at boot in Xen has changed. You should now specify the maximum memory – dom0_mem=2G,max:2G instead of dom0_mem=2G. Also, a new addition to the Xen Best Practices suggests preventing Xen from auto-ballooning the dom0 memory down by changing autoballoon in […]
cron screwyness
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux on May 2, 2012
While trying to diagnose a problem with my VMs (namely, why starting a fedora 16 based vm fails to bring up the network connection), I ran into a strange issue – on my dom0 and some of the domUs, logrotate hasn’t been running, leaving me with insanely long logfiles! So I set out trying to […]
Defining the dom0 memory limit in GRUB2
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Xen on April 30, 2012
Before I upgraded my dom0 to Fedora 16 (and by association Grub2), I had the dom0 memory limit fixed as an argument in grub.conf. When I upgraded to Grub2, I initially added it manually to the Xen boot command line, but eventually stopped doing that. Today while looking through the xen-users list, I found an […]
Fedora 16 domUs – Update
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Xen on November 23, 2011
So, I’ve wiped my test system with the intention of doing a tutorial on installing F16 + Xen. As part of this, I looked into installing a F16 domU with virt-install. When I tried it previously, I ran into this bug, and I ended up having to vnc into the dom0 and use virt-viewer to […]