DaveQB's Rambles

On Monday at 17:34 I rang Internode to start the process to move from FTTN --> FTTP...that's when the story all started. I knew they had to move my old (customer since 2006) account to their new system. Got the ball rolling, pre-paid the next month's connection and would receive a call during the week to arrange the NBN box install. 8:02 the next morning by connection dropped out. My modem had been running with the same connection details since I first was setup on NBN, maybe 8 years ago. A day of phone calls with technical staff with them saying their end was fine and to check my end, even though nothing had changed at my end but there were changes on my account on their end.

I was told so much garbage.

• "Please sir, reload your modem with your details. Nothing has changed so use the same details." What? Reconfigure that modern, there's been working without change for 8 years, with the SAME details.
• Call Cisco to ask them how to configure your modem with Internode 😂. The same modern that's been working for 8 years without needing any attention. Even though they changed my account from the old to the new system.
• First & second support staff said there's no change I need to make. Third said my username has changed and need to update that. That didn't resolve it. Fourth said my password has changed. Deposit getting a PPP light on the modern which is authentication successful. Changing those didn't resolve the issue
• Used a spare NetComm modern. Same issue. Told to call NetComm to ask them how to figure it with Internode 😆😆
• Pre paid for the next month because it this account switching. Paid the extra $10 for my static IP I've had for 15 years. Then later told they no longer have the static IP feature in the new system. See I have a $10 credit on my account now.

So by about midnight Tuesday night I was online with Launtel. What an amazing ISP. Based out of Launceston, Tasmania, Australia. For the techy people; they know what they're talking about from the 2 people I spoke with. Charles stayed back 80 minutes after his shift to get me connected (they had a sign up technical issue I hit, I think I was Internet cursed yesterday). You can change your plan on a daily basis; only pay for the most expensive plan you were on for that day. So you can drop to a very slow/cheap plan while you're away or pause it altogether for $0.50/day. Spent 19 years with Internode, who were so so so so good. I feared once they were sold to TPG quality would drop, and alas. They were one of the first ISP to have their own backbone in Australia, in the early 2000's. Such a good company.

Side note, my backup WAN link on my pfSense (travel wifi router to my mobile phone's hot spot) worked well for the house Tuesday 😄. Flaky connection and all, but worked.

Update: Got a missed call from Internode yesterday. I assume level 2 support, Thursday. Spoke to them today to cancel and curious to know the root cause. The current status was....they still don't know. WOW.

I think I have fallen behind in the latest tools to do this elegantly. I found a great page explaining the commands needed. I will paraphrase here for my own notes and in case the site goes away.

A handy command is: ubuntu-drivers. In this instance, we run ubuntu-drivers devices to see the driver options we have. From there, we can run sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall to install the recommended driver or sudo apt install nvidia-driver-460 to install a specific driver. Reboot. We have another command nvidia-smi that gives us good info about our Nvidia graphics card and the driver being used.

Long time, no post. Now running KDE Neon on my desktop and added a USB dongle. When ever I turned off bluetooth I could not turn it back on using the GUI. I found the "btusb" module was not loaded, so a:

sudo modprobe btusb

Solved that. I figured it might be permissions that didn't alllow me to turn bluetooth back on. Sure enough, I was not in the "bluetooth" group.

I have long wanted to try FreeIPA but haven't had the need. Now I do. I just wanted to record the issues I have had.

I am installing on RHEL 7.2 in AWS using the AWS AMI.

• So apparently the entry in your local hosts file for your FQDN and your IP address (not 127.0.0.0/8 address) is needed even if DNS (both A and PTR reverse records) is working on your network.
• Being a Red Hat developed product, I would have thought it would have worked with SELinux, but no. I had repeated failed installatioins setting up the dirsrv until I disabled SELinux and then installation finished first go. Go figure.

So far that's it. Looking at using FreeIPA's builtin DNS instead of my Bind9 setup DNS servers. There's no zone file as I am used to as FreeIPA is using bind-dyndb-ldap so records are kept in LDAP. But the commands to manage them seem very thorough. I am just worried if DNS breaks down, I won't have the knowledge to fix it like I could with my own managed bind setup.

The issue is mail that comes into a postfix server destined for an external address (think group addresses) will skip procmail. Spamassasin only rewrites headers, it does not delete mail. As a result, mail that is even detected and marked as spam are sent out on to users that are external making your mail server a spam bot. I found many tutorials online around this. See references. The answer was in the value set to postfix option, content_filter, in master.cf config. Here you put a name of a transport that filters mail and then puts it back in the queue (or deletes it etc). I had spamassasin there that was defined later in the config to use spamc. Again, this won't delete anything.

So I created my own script, a variant on what I saw is in the tutorials and deleted mail marked spam. After some typos and speling mistakes, it was all working. I added a logger line when deleting an email so there's more fo a record.

Ref: http://www.postfix.org/FILTER_README.html#simple_filter http://www.akadia.com/services/postfix_spamassassin.html https://joost.vunderink.net/blog/2011/04/23/deleting-spam-with-postfix-and-spamassassin/

Some VPS providers don't have a Debian 8 template to build your VPS from. Just Debian 7. So you need to do the upgrade yourself. Not a big task, but there is the change to systemd to consider. So here are the commands that you need for this. After changing all references to wheezy in your /etc/apt/sources.list file to jessie:

# update with the new sources.list
apt-get update
# Make aure you have all the keys you need
apt-get install --reinstall debian-archive-keyring
# In case you're coming from a minimal Debian 7 template
apt-get -y install dialog
# In case your locale is not setup, again, coming from a minial template
dpkg-reconfigure locales
# The upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
# Check the version upgrade has taken place
lsb_release -a
# or
cat /etc/debian_version
# Swap out upstart with systemd
apt-get -y install systemd systemd-sysv
# Need to force a reboot I found as init is not working due to the above
reboot -f
# Check systemd and not upstart is running
ps aux|grep '(systemd|upstart)'
# Remove upstart and its files
apt-get -y purge upstart
rm -fr /var/log/upstart
# Done

If you have a messy of a source.list(.d) then you can build a clean one here Ref: http://justinfranks.com/linux-administration/upgrade-openvz-vps-from-debian-7-wheezy-64-bit-to-debian-8-jessie-64-bit

Hi all,

If you're reading this, you may have ran into the same issue I did.

Symptoms
• FUDForum gives a 200 HTTP response but 0bytes of data (blank white page)
• No errors in your logs

I ran into this when Roundcube stopped working for me when I moved my webamail vhosts to a different server.

I found the issue here was that in my fpm php.ini config I had:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0

This was the default config for this server.
I changed this to:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

And this got roundcube working. Yay! And it is safer too.

But now FUDForum was broken (see symptoms above). Digging further, I pieced together that the solution was to add the below to your *.php block in nginx:

fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

Once this is done you should now be getting 500 internal error pres from your server. The issue is it can't find the GLOBALS.php file due to the include path (well atleast for me anyway)

So then set your include_path in your php pool config for the php pool your FUDForum website is using:

php_value[include_path]  = "/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear:/var/local/FUDforum/scripts:/var/local/FUDforum/include:/var/local/FUDforum/include/theme/default"

Change the path to match the data folder of your installation (/var/local/FUDforum) You should be right to go.

Ref: http://serverfault.com/questions/514157/how-to-set-php-include-path-for-php-fpm-in-nginx-config
http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=119217&goto=162124&#msg_162124

So it seems the cgi.fix_pathinfo setting needs to be set to 1 in your php.ini file in order for this line to not break everything in your nginx config:

fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

So to wrap up, set:

cgi.fix_pathinfo 1;

In your php.ini.

So you want to run CrashPlan on FreeBSD. So do I!

I did lots of searching but the main article I used was this http://worrbase.com/2012/03/31/Crashplan.html. I'll go through it next.
I didn't edit my make.conf. So right off the bat I am diverging. I did edit my rc.conf and added the below to it:

crashplan_enable="YES"
linux_enable="YES"

and then installed these with pkgng:

linux-f10-expat-2.0.1_1
linux-f10-fontconfig-2.6.0_1
linux-f10-procps-3.2.7
linux-f10-xorg-libs-7.4_1
*linux-sun-jre17-7.71
linux_base-f10-10_7

* Needed to use ports to install this package.
I only added one fstab entry as the linux compat seems to have full access to the FS:

linproc   /compat/linux/proc   linprocfs   rw   0  0

Download crashplan somewhere under /compat/linux, and then chroot into your linux environment. Run the install script, and back out.

# chroot /compat/linux/ /bin/bash
# cd CrashPlan-install && ./install.sh

Edited my /compat/linux/usr/local/crashplan/bin/run.conf to look like this:

SRV_JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.nio.channels.spi.SelectorProvider=sun.nio.ch.PollSelectorProvider -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dapp=CrashPlanService -DappBaseName=CrashPlan -Xms20m -Xmx1024m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dsun.net.inetaddr.ttl=300 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.ttl=300 -Dsun.net.inetaddr.negative.ttl=0 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.negative.ttl=0 -Dc42.native.md5.enabled=false"
GUI_JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.nio.channels.spi.SelectorProvider=sun.nio.ch.PollSelectorProvider -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dapp=CrashPlanDesktop -DappBaseName=CrashPlan -Xms20m -Xmx512m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dsun.net.inetaddr.ttl=300 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.ttl=300 -Dsun.net.inetaddr.negative.ttl=0 -Dnetworkaddress.cache.negative.ttl=0 -Dc42.native.md5.enabled=false"

And to /compat/linux/usr/local/crashplan/install.vars I appened:

JAVACOMMON=/usr/local/linux-sun-jre1.7.0/bin/java

And my /usr/local/etc/rc.d/crashplan contains:

#!/bin/sh
#

# PROVIDE: crashplan
# REQUIRE: NETWORKING
# KEYWORD: shutdown

. /etc/rc.subr

name="crashplan"
rcvar=`set_rcvar`
start_cmd=crashplan_start
stop_cmd=crashplan_stop

crashplan_start () {
  /compat/linux/bin/bash /usr/local/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanEngine start
}

crashplan_stop () {
  /compat/linux/bin/bash /usr/local/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanEngine stop
}

load_rc_config $name
run_rc_command "$1"

An issue I had after upgrading from 9.3 to 10.0 was the path in the run.conf reverted back to default. It took awhile to realise and even longer to figure it out. I haven't proof read this post but I hope it helps me (and you) when the time comes.

It turns out that multi-master replication is nothing more than a "criss-cross" master-slave replication setup. To explain that better with an example, server A is the master for server B and server B is the master of server A. This obviously mean any changes on either is replicated to the other. So you simply get master-slave replication working in one way, then mimic that on the other side once satisfied.

The first step in getting this working is to set up the config files. See here:

[mysqld]
# Needed for masters and slaves
server-id       = 3
log_bin         = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log
binlog_format=row
gtid_mode=on
enforce_gtid_consistency=true
log_slave_updates=true

# Needed for the slaves
# Better to filter here than using binlog_do_db on the master etc
# http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/05/14/why-mysqls-binlog-do-db-option-is-dangerous/
# more here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/replication-options-binary-log.html#option_mysqld_binlog-do-db
replicate-wild-ignore-table=mysql.%
replicate-wild-ignore-table=information_schema.%
replicate-wild-ignore-table=performance_schema.%

relay_log         = /var/log/mysql/mysql-relay-bin.log
# http://jonathonhill.net/2011-09-30/mysql-replication-that-hurts-less/
auto-increment-offset = 1
auto-increment-increment = 4
read_only=OFF

I simply add this to /etc/mysql/conf.d/ ensuring the file name ends in .cnf. Restart mysql and that part is done. Next we connect to one of the servers, let's call this one A. Step 1 is to create a dump or a snapshot of your data.

 mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases --flush-privileges --single-transaction --master-data=2 --flush-logs --triggers --routines --events --hex-blob  |bzip2 > $HOSTNAME-$(date +%F).sql.bz2

Next step is to add the replication user on server A. You could use root, but best not to as you will be setting up the user (password and all) on another server.

 GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO 'rep'@'slave_ip' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_secret';

Now on server B, import the dump from A.

 bzcat $HOSTNAME-$(date +%F).sql.bz | mysql -u root -p

Now we tell server B where the master server is and the user to use (the one we just setup).

 change master to master_host='master_ip", master_port=3306, master_user='rep', master_password='some_secret', master_auto_position=1; 
start slave; 

We should be up and running. Check with the "show slave status\G" command on the slave. Now we simply repeat this but the other way around (skipping the dump and restore) in order to set up multi-master. Setup a replication user on B, then run the "change master to" command on server A so it is now a slave of B. All should be done now. See the references for troubleshooting. I actually use stunnel to connect my MySQL servers over the internet. Also, you can create a ~/.my.cnf file with your login info to save having to pass that to the mysql command every time. Contents would like so:

[client]
user=root
password=some_secret

Ref: http://fromdual.com/gtid_in_action?_ga=1.204815570.317472044.1416546765 http://fromdual.com/replication-troubleshooting-classic-vs-gtid https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-mysql-master-master-replication http://www.percona.com/blog/2013/02/08/how-to-createrestore-a-slave-using-gtid-replication-in-mysql-5-6/