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Blog About Dedicated Servers

Install Mailscanner MRTG

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:55

This will install Mailscanner MRTG on your system. I have tested it on Ensim 3.1.10 and Ensim 3.5.17. Others have also done this on CPanel, but make sure you make the change noted...

Regular, I am not responsible for your box/you are doing this at YOUR OWN RISK... It should not screw anything up, but you are ultimately responsible if it does. I will help out as much as I can, but I am not a genius.

PREREQUISITES
1) MRTG *MUST* be installed (HOW-TO)
2) Mailscanner *MUST* be installed (I use gpans MS/SA/CM HOW-TO, but there is a MS Only HOW-TO too)

INSTRUCTIONS
cd ~
wget http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourc...rtg-0.05.tar.gz
tar -xzvf mailscanner-mrtg-0.05.tar.gz
cd mailscanner-mrtg-0.05
cp mailscanner-mrtg.conf /etc/MailScanner/
cp mailscanner-mrtg.cfg /etc/mrtg/
cp mailscanner-mrtg /usr/sbin/
cp mailscanner-mrtg.include /etc/httpd/conf/
cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.bk

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Chkrootkit

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:43

Installing CHKROOTKIT

(Version 0.42b Sep 20 2003)

SSH as admin to your server. DO NOT use telnet

#Change to root
su -

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Use SFTP (Secure FTP via SSH2) instead of FTP

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:41

NOTE: If you have SSH set up on your server, your server is ready to be an SFTP server. SFTP uses SSH.


What does this How-To show you?

a. How to install, setup and use an SFTP client to connect to your box using SSH2 to download/ upload files rather than FTP.

b. How to block port 21 (the default FTP port) which you don't need anymore.

c. How to uninstall and remove the FTP server from your box (if you don't need it anymore).


Why you should NOT use normal FTP

Most people use normal unsecure FTP do upload and download files to their servers using an FTP client from home.

The problem with this is that YOUR USERNAME AND PASSWORD are sent in PLAIN TEXT - a hacker can easily get this information and use it to gain access to your server.

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Install/Upgrade ProFTPd

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:22

Ensim
I'm not going to handle Ensim again since gpan made a nice Howto on this issue and even created
rpms for your usage all information can be found here.
After installing it you can also do the proftpd.conf tweak but you have todo pico -w /etc/proftpd.conf
note:
1. that i can't give any support on the rpm made by gpan, so that will have to go through him.
2. Mouse is against upgrading your ProFTPd on Ensim when you run a up to date 3.1.x and 3.5.x

Plesk
Nighthawk just said to me that this is actually a bad idea for Plesk.
Nighthawk has years of experience with Plesk so i fully support what he's saying about Plesk whatsoever .
So your officially warned by me and NightHawk so dont do this howto on your system.
You will destroy it otherwise but you can do the proftpd.conf tweak without a problem, so just skip most of this how-to and usage pico -w /etc/proftpd.conf instead just like Ensim.

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Tcpdump

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:20

What is tcpdump?

Tcpdump prints out what traffic is going inbound/outbound including headers.

Why should i usage tcpdump?

tcpdump is nice to monitor your network.

Download:

Redhat 9:
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/9/en....7.2-1.i386.rpm

Redhat 8:
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/upda....8.0.3.i386.rpm

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Upgrade kernel on Dual Xeons

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:15

Updated for latest kernel (RH 7.3):

2.4.20-24.7

This is the way I did it - I went to 2.4.20-18.7 first, then went to 2.4.20-20.7. (in any case I am running 2.4.20-20.9 which is the latest for RH 9 - this How-To assumes you are running RH 7.3, but the steps are the same).

This section has 2 parts:

If you are running a kernel that is OLDER THAN 2.4.20-18.7 run PART A first, then PART B.

If you are already running 2.4.20-18.7, go straight to Part B.

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2.4.22 Kernel upgrade from SOURCE on XEON

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:12

What is new:
1. Quota support
2. ACPI support -> "CONFIG_ACPI_HT_ONLY=y"
( I spent 1.5 hours to find out why we boot without HT )

1) cd /usr/src

2) wget kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.22.tar.bz2

3) bzcat linux-2.4.22.tar.bz2 | tar xv

4) rm linux

5) ln -s linux-2.4.22 linux

6) cd /usr/src/linux

7)
wget 64.246.63.172/conf2.txt <---- config file
mv conf2.txt .config
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.22
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22
cd /boot
ln -sf System.map-2.4.22 System.map
ln -sf vmlinuz-2.4.22 vmlinuz

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Use RCS for version control when editing system configuration files

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 21:05

RCS is one of the oldest file revision control systems in use. It works on single files and is very handy for system administration. If you use RCS properly, you will have the ability to roll back a configuration file should you mess up an edit, and you also create an audit trail that shows what you (or others working with you) edited when ... very handy.

When you check a file into RCS, RCS creates a version control file for the file in question .. the version control master file is named the same as the original file with ',v' added to the end of the name.

Example:

/etc/hosts
/etc/hosts,v <-- RCS control file

NOTE 1: Make sure to use ci -u when checking in a file, if you just use ci the working copy will be removed.

NOTE 2: Also be aware that you may have to reset ownership / permissions of the file after checking a revision out!

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Watchdog - Auto-Reboot your server in case of failures

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 20:50

Watchdog HowTo
==============
Keywords: software autoreboot, autorebooting, auto-reboot, auto-rebooting, auto rebooting

Watchdog is a program that you can use to reboot your server automatically in a lot of cases.
It has been used succesfully to reboot servers in the "Unexplained Crash" problem, that can have as causes a disk queue starvation problem, or a quota/ext3 filesystem deadlock, crashing the server many times randomly. If downtime due crashes in your system is a problem, probably you must use watchdog to assure you peacefully tranquility back again.

This works in any distribution: Ensim, Plesk, CPanel, etc., in any Linux system.

As documentation in /usr/src/[your-linux-kernel]/Documentation/watchdog.txt, kernel provides watchdog timer interfaces in a device named /dev/watchdog, "which when open must be written to within a timeout or the machine will reboot. Each write delays the reboot time another timeout. In the case of the software watchdog the ability to reboot will depend on the state of the machines and interrupts. The hardware boards physically pull the machine down off their own onboard timers and will reboot from almost anything.". The timeout default is 60 seconds.

The watchdog program simply uses the /dev/watchdog device, activating the softdog module on your system, if you have support in your kernel, and writes in /dev/watchdog within 10 seconds, making several checks in your system. If your system crashes, or watchdog stop to working, or in any case watchdog be supposed not to write in that device in 60 seconds, but kernel remains live, it will reboot within 60 seconds.

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Upgrade the Linux Kernel

Luigi Ramone | 15 December, 2005 20:46

We've used the following instructions to upgrade our Linux Kernel at Rackshack from 2.4.9-31 to 2.4.18.

There were no problems, and we did not have to get Rackshack technical support installed.

Please note that upgrading the kernel can be dangerious and it is possible to freeze your system bad enough that Rackshack support has to get involved.

I would recommend reading the README file included with the kernel source prior to following these steps. It will provide an outline along with recovery techniques (if needed).

If this is something you want some one with system administration capabilities (for a fee) to do, please contact us. Otherwise, enjoy.

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