Archive for category Sysadmin

Fixing a mangled NTFS partition: success

A follow-up from kyl191.net/2012/08/rebuilding-a-partition-table-after-failed-resize/ Almost two years on, Correcting errors in the Master File Table (MFT) mirror. Correcting errors in the master file table’s (MFT) BITMAP attribute. Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system. My drive is back! And seemingly OK! I’m celebrating by setting up a Python […]

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Getting Django running on CentOS 6

Trying to follow this guide: www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-and-configure-django-with-postgres-nginx-and-gunicorn epel6 rpms only seem to install 8.4 at this time, not 9.3 (strangely, since 8.4 isn’t supported anymore, so… I have many questions) Official 9.3 installation go! wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/YUM_Installation But WTF1: It was installed to /usr/pqsql-9.3, which wasn’t in the search path, so all the createdb and etc commands didn’t […]

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Django + Nginx resources

For SE Hack Day: michal.karzynski.pl/blog/2013/06/09/django-nginx-gunicorn-virtualenv-supervisor/ looks the best (along with michal.karzynski.pl/blog/2013/07/14/using-redis-as-django-session-store-and-cache-backend/) wiki.nginx.org/DjangoFastCGI and https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoAndNginx are Django + FastCGI adambard.com/blog/start-to-finish-serving-mysql-backed-django-w/ blog.richard.do/index.php/2013/04/setting-up-nginx-django-uwsgi-a-tutorial-that-actually-works/ serverfault.com/questions/370525/nginxdjango-serving-static-files/370573#370573 stackoverflow.com/questions/17511466/deploying-django-on-nginx www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-and-configure-django-with-postgres-nginx-and-gunicorn because postgres

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Recovering a broken F18 installation

For some reason (possibly a broken F17 upgrade which moved /lib around?) there were a bunch of empty files in /lib. So F18 refused to boot, with error messages like “/lib/libsystemd.so:0 :File too short” I discovered yum doesn’t like chroots: Kept on getting a message regarding build_time_vars missing. (Spoiler: This was actually Python!) I also […]

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OpenVPN & China’s Firewall

Ended up choosing an SSH SOCKS proxy + Tunnelblick because it had the fewest moving parts. Combined with a passwordless SSH key, I saw this status on Facebook today: Kyle is truly a computer wizard! as in, his Tunnelblick thingy is working! Location? China. Success.

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The importance of having ntpd configured

Ok, not really importance of having it configured, but at least a post to try and get myself to remember to do it. I discovered that the Dreamhost server I’m hosting this blog on has bad clock drift. I’m not sure why it’s happening (I’d imagine that it should be one of the first things […]

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Getting CodeIgniter/Bonfire running on nginx

So… I’ve been trying CI/Bonfire as a quick PHP dev platform. Unfortunately, it’s pre-packaged for Apache’s .htaccess, so it takes a bit of configuration to get working on nginx. The following assumes PHP-FPM is actually working though.  Installing CI/Bonfire For some reason, the install portion has its own index.php. So the default PHP pretty URL rewriting […]

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Getting PHP-FPM running on nginx

Getting FastCGI working on nginx I have two files – a modified version of FastCGI_params, and an extra file that contains my configuration directives for .php files. The second file is simply named php_fastcgi and is located in the same folder as nginx.conf, and is include php_fastcgi;-d anywhere I need PHP support: # Process PHP […]

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Now that I’m actually looking for it

I’m seeing stuff about China’s blocking VPNs everywhere: New York Times, the BBC, and of course, Slashdot. Interesting tidbit: OpenVPN over TCP on port 53 apparently works. Not sure why it’d be like that, but maybe it’s something unexpected from infrastructure put in place for DNS poisoning. Possibly unrestricted, but mirrored to the DNS servers, […]

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Tunneling OpenVPN through SSH

Having a bit of time, and remembering that OpenVPN had an option for SOCKS proxies, I decided to take a stab at getting OpenVPN to work through a SOCKS proxy. It was far easier than expected.

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