Linux System Admins Blog

We will celebrate the Linux System Administrator Appriciation day tomorrow. Yes, there is such a thing, if its in wikipedia (wiki system administrator appreciation Day), than it must be true!
See what its all about here:
System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day, SysAdminDay or SAAD, was created by system administrator Ted Kekatos. Kekatos was inspired to create [...]

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This is my second activity on using AWS – this time the use of EBS.
Objectives:

Format a new EBS (10GB) and mount it on a running instance of private AMI (created on first activity – add link/ref to old post)
Setup a MySQL server with the datastore on EBS partition
Setup the partition(EBS) to start [...]

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When using cPanel the way to enable allow_url_include directive locally (per user) is to create an Virtual Host include:
First create an include file:
/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/username/domain.com/custom.conf
Add directive to custom.conf:

php_admin_flag allow_url_include On

Then run to enable include:
/scripts/ensure_vhost_includes –user=username –verbose
Alternatively, enabling allow_url_include globally (server-wide) is done by editing /usr/local/lib/php.ini and adding “allow_url_include = On” directive to the Fopen wrapper section.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; [...]

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Are you often waiting over 1 minute to get a ssh prompt? This can be caused by several things however more often then not is a missing PTR record for server address and enabled GSSAPIAuthentication in ssh_config. GSSAPIAuthentiction is Kerberos 5 centralized authentication/authorization mechanism that relies on resolving a hostname for proper operation, when it [...]

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Here’s an interesting one, what if you have a MySQL replication setup and the slave stops replicating with a syntax error? The slave should be executing the exact same commands as the master, right? Well, as it turns out, yes and no. There is a bug in MySQL that has been fixed in 5.0.56 according [...]

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TrueCrypt is an open source encryption application, it has an ability to create hidden encrypted containers and file systems/volumes, it is portable and cross platform compatible. It allows to use cascading cyphers and encrypts/decrypts files on the fly. Be sure to read the FAQ and documentation before fully committing your files to TrueCrypt.
- install via [...]

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It was an issue reported by our developer as she’s having trouble getting the correct parameters for video conversion using ffmpeg. The problem is the scratchy sound when the conversion is done on our server (CentOS). So she tried it on local (Windows) using Pazera Converter and loaded the same parameters used on [...]

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Yesterday I received new installation request from developers to install ApacheSolr module for Drupal. Check this link for more details on Apache Solr Search Integration. Since this is new to me I spent some time on searching and doing test installations. To make it short below is my setup on our shared [...]

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