Booservers - All about dedicated servers

Easy CURL 7.10.4 w/SSL

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:35:04 +0000

We've put together these RPM's for libcurl 7.10.2 with SSL support. They upgrade over the stock RH ones. Installation is via rpm -Uvh

Applicability (RH 7.2 / 7.3 required) :

Webppliance 3.1
Webppliance Pro 3.5
cPanel 6
Plesk 5.0

These are also Modernbill compatible on all above panel types.

Downloadables:

curl-7.10.4-1.i386.rpm
curl-devel-7.10.4-1.i386.rpm

MD5 Checksums

37a04f7db8c34fddbb309d067d16a453 curl-7.10.4-1.i386.rpm
e09253b7c227573f4e5b10d3987f433b curl-devel-7.10.4-1.i386.rpm

Credits: http://www.cheetaweb.com/

APF Firewall 0.9.4-7

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:32:07 +0000

Just thought I'd update the howto's for APF.

Type ifconfig

Find out if it�s using eth0 or eth1.

Usually its eth0 but if its not, change it in conf.apf or you�ll be completely blocking the server from access

wget http://www.rfxnetworks.com/downloads/apf-current.tar.gz

tar -xvzf apf-current.tar.gz
cd apf*
./install.sh
pico -w /etc/apf/conf.apf

RESV_DNS="1"

All SYSCTL options should be set to 1 EXCEPT for
SYSCTL_OVERFLOW="0"
SYSCTL_SYNCOOKIES="0"

USE_DS="1"
USE_AD="1"

FOR PLESK:

IG_TCP_CPORTS="20,21,22,25,53,80,110,143,443,465,993,995,8443"
IG_UDP_CPORTS="37,53,873"

EGF="1"
EG_TCP_CPORTS="20,21,22,25,53,37,43,80,113,443,465,873"
EG_UDP_CPORTS="53,873"

For CPANEL:

IG_TCP_CPORTS="20,21,22,25,53,80,110,143,443,993,995,2082,2083,20 86,2087,2095,2096"
IG_UDP_CPORTS="37,53,873"

EGF="1"
EG_TCP_CPORTS="20,21,22,25,37,53,43,80,113,443,465,873,2087,2089"
EG_UDP_CPORTS="53,873"

apf �s to start firewall.

If you are not kicked out of SSH and you can type commands after it loads, that means it�s installed correctly.

pico -w /etc/apf/ad/conf.antidos

LP_KLOG="1"

USR_ALERT="1"
USER = �root�
ARIN_ALERT="1"

pico -w /etc/apf/conf.apf

change DEVM to 0

apf -r

Get FTP running on your P-NET (PNET) storage server

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:43:11 +0000

Telnet/SSH into your P-NET server as root (or use su).

Use the following command:
/sbin/service vsftpd start

This will start the ftp server.

That's it!

If you are going to use cPanel's backup feature you should probably create a separate user account.

Here's now:
/usr/sbin/useradd username
passwd username

The last command will ask you to set a password and confirm it.

Check server hardware

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:41:09 +0000

There are a lot of things that may cause a server to crash, this guide is going to primarily look at the hardware side of crashing. There are many things that might be causing the server to crash from a software standpoint such a process that runs out of control or uses too many resources. There are a fwe things that might be going wrong with a server. Normally the component that goes wrong is the hard drive, simply because it is use so much and is a moving part. The RAM on a server will occasionally go but this is more common when the server is moved around or the RAM moved because it has a chance of being statically shocked. On the less common side of things you could have the CPU, powersupply, ethernet card, or motherboard going out.

A few important things first:

Does the server crash on a regular basis at the same time? If so look at the cronjobs on the server. If you are running RHEL and cPanel you should disable the auditd because it may be causing the crashes.

Check your /var/log/messages file for the time before the crash and when the server boots up because you will sometimes be able to see an error. If something like the ethernet card goes down you should also see it because the log files will still be writing, you just will not be able to access the server physically.

Make sure your kernel and other software is at the latest version. There have been a few kernel versions with bad drivers that can cause stability problems.

The easiest thing to look at it smartctl which is a command line tool that reads the status information from the drive directly. Almost modern drive will have the SMART capability which can be probed.

# smartctl -H /dev/sda

If that shows nothing bad take a look at

# smartctl -a /dev/sda

which will show any errors that the disk has encountered. A few errors are ok and normal but if you have more then just a few then it is definatly something to check out. Now since smartctl is a computer program there is a chance that the diagnostics are not correct. Because of this the next best thing to do is to run a disk check. Badblocks is a common tool used to check the disk for errors. To run it go ahead and run badblocks:

#badblocks -v -v /dev/sda

This disk check is going to take a few minutes and will also be constantly using your drive during this time. If your server is very busy you may have trouble with other services running in the background that need to access the disks. If you still think that the disk is bad i would suggest running badblocks 3-5 times. It is possible that the disk drive is just starting to go bad and it might not detect any problems on the first run. If smartctl and badblocks both show nothing chances are the disk driver is just fine.

The next thing to check out on the server is the RAM. To do this we will use memtester which is a very simple program that simply uses the RAM continously and runs it though a series of tests in order to detect any problems with it. First download and install memtester:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://pyropus.ca/software/memteste...er-4.0.5.tar.gz
tar -zxf memtester-4.0.5.tar.gz
cd memtester-4.0.5
make

Now that it has been compiled we are going to have to run it. NOTE when you run memtester it is going to use all of the RAM and your server load will probably jump pretty high. First make sure of how much RAM you have in the system via

free -m

If for some reason this amount is not what you expect the RAM may in fact be bad. It would be in your best interest to have it checked out to make sure why the correct amount is not present, it might simply be because of an error at the datacenter. Below is what you would run if you have 1024 or 1Gb of ram and have it run 5 seperate times to hopefully catch and problems.

./memtester 1024 5

Since the server is using some of the RAM you are going to get an error like the below:
got 460MB (483188736 bytes), trying mlock ...too many pages, reducing...

Though it is best to close as much as possible before the test it is usually not required. Chances are if the server is using the RAM then it is probably good, of course if nothing else can be found it might be worth closing everything and going back and running memtester again. If all 5 tests come back with no problems chances are that the RAM is ok.

Ok that covers most of the stuff that normally goes wrong. The next thing we can try is simply to try to overload the server and see what happens. The program that we will use is simply called stress. It attempt to overload the cpu and hard drive all at once. First go ahead and download and compile the program to run the tests:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects...s-0.18.4.tar.gz
tar -zxf stress-0.18.4.tar.gz
cd stress-0.18.4
./configure
make; make install

Now we are going to actually run it. Try using the following command to see what happens. This is more or less going to be a last ditch effort to try and get the server to crash by simulating it being very busy. Since this test is relatively short you may try running it a few times to see if you can get it to crash. If the server does crash it does not necessarily mean that there is a hardware problem but it says something is wrong. It is probably best to switch out the hardware if possible if it crashes running the test assuming as I put above you are running the latest drivers and kernels. Here is the command:

stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 256M --timeout 60s

Credits: John W

Install HotSaNIC (updated)

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:26:37 +0000

HotSaNIC is a very nice tool which combines all sorts of very important system graphs into a simple and easy to understand webpage. It allows the admin to take a quick glance at the graphs to see what may or may not be working with the system. With the new APPS graph it is also possible to watch as more processes are started which can be helpful in tracking down why the server load is increasing. For instance if you see a huge load spike but you see that the number of exim processes has gone up significantly at the same time you can start to investigate.

First, we will need to install RRDtool

-----command-----
cd /usr/local/src/
wget http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/w.../rrdtool.tar.gz
tar -zxf rrdtool.tar.gz
cd rrdtool*
./configure
make
make install
make site-perl-install
cd ..
rm -fr rrdtool*

-----command-----

Now we will install and configure HotSaNIC

-----command-----
cd /usr/local
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/...-0.5.0-pre5.tgz
tar -zxf hotsanic-0.5.0-pre5.tgz
rm -rf hotsanic-0.5.0-pre5.tgz
cd HotSaNIC
./setup.pl

-----command-----

You will be asked a number of questions during the install script.

Module found: APCUSV Do you want to use this module?
Choose 'n'

Module found: APPS Do you want to use this module?
Choose 'y'