Tag: sysadmin
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Amavis / SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin Some random bits and pieces related to SpamAssassin and Amavis
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Moving towards ‘inbox zero’
Over time my inbox grows larger and larger…. and eventually it starts to take ages to sync/navigate around – 15,000+ messages in an inbox can’t help.
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Virtualbox 4.2 VM autostart on Debian Squeeze & Wheezy
One new feature of VirtualBox 4.2 is that it has support for auto-starting vm’s on bootup of the host server (via init etc). This means I can remove my hackish ‘su – vbox -c “VBoxHeadless –startvm VMName &”‘ additions in /etc/rc.local, and the VM’s will also hopefully be terminated gracefully on shutdown. The docs/guides online…
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Migrating an ext3 filesystem to ext4 (Debian Squeeze)
Interestingly (well, perhaps not really) this is very easy. In my case, I’m hoping that the migration will lead to faster fsck times (currently it’s taking about an hour, which is somewhat excessive, each time the server crashes for whatever reason). In my case, the filesystem is /dev/md0 and mounted at /home – change the…
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netstat –tcp -lp output not showing a process id
I often use ‘netstat –tcp -lpn’ to display a list of open ports on a server – so i can check things aren’t listening where they shouldn’t be (e.g. MySQL accepting connections from the world) and so on. Obviously I firewall boxes; but I like to have a reasonable default incase the firewall decides to…
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Checking varnish configuration syntax
If you’ve updated your varnish server’s configuration, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent of ‘apachectl configtest’ for it, but you can do : varnishd -C -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl If everything is correct, varnish will then dump out the generated configuration. Otherwise you’ll get an error message pointing you to a specific line number.
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Automated snapshot backup of an Amazon EBS volume
I found the following Python script online, but it didn’t really work too well : http://aws-musings.com/manage-ebs-snapshots-with-a-python-script/ EBS – Elastic Block Storage … I had to easy_install boto, to get it to work. I’m not sure the Debian python-boto package in Lenny is up to date. Anyway, $server now has : from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection from…
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Varnish + Zope – Multiple zope instances behind a single varnish cache
I run multiple Zope instances on one server. Each Zope instance listens on a different port (localhost:100xx). Historically I’ve just used Apache as a front end which forwards requests to the Zope instance. Unfortunately there are periods of the year when one site gets a deluge of requests (for example; when hosting a school site,…