Category Archives: Software

simplify your daily ssh usage… even more…

On MeyerMillerSmith.com I recently posted this one: Typing ssh commands can be very annoying but it doesn’t has to. There’s a quite nice way to simplify your daily admin life: shell scripts. Okay, let’s say we have a dozen servers … Continue reading

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ProFTPD with mod_dnsbl as gentoo ebuild

Recently we realized that proftpd misses several modules that are available but not included in the standard distribution. Therefore, we created an ebuild. As time was short today, we only included mod_dnsbl. In the near future, we will add more … Continue reading

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find out if your Apache is really serving the right hosts

From time to time it can happen that websites that used to be on your webservers are being moved by your clients without notifying you. Therefore, you will have to search for «zombie websites». I have the following setup: There … Continue reading

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SFTP only and SSH only OpenSSH system with gentoo

Although there are many ways workarounding the lack of security with ye olde FTP, there is a quite handy solution: use OpenSSH via SCP/SFTP to handle the file transfers. There are many solutions which all try to restrict the access … Continue reading

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rebuilding Cyrus indexes

You might know the situation, something happened, and afterwards you get error messages from Cyrus telling you that your databases just have crashed. Then, your Inbox is shown empty while the filesystem does show the correct files. What happened? Every … Continue reading

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Request Tracker 3.8.2 on gentoo

We finally managed to release a package for the (currently) recent version of Best Practical’s Request Racker (rt). We added it to our layman / portage overlay. see the following article for information on how to add it to your … Continue reading

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our own gentoo portage overlay

Gentoo has, is and will be the distribution of our choice. As it is with every love, nothing is perfect. So is Gentoo. We missed the recent packages for Bestpractical’s Request Tracker. Therefore, we created our own Layman overlay. That’s … Continue reading

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tomcat on port 80

You might know the situation: You’d like to run tomcat from a privileged port, but the bloody thing just won’t start. Of course, it’s java-specific. Usually, a daemon gets its port from root. Not with Java. Your possibilities are therefore … Continue reading

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creating apache vhosts with style

We decided to have a reverse domain name structure that conatains (beside the htdocs) all vhost-related information like logs, stats and config. The reverse structure is neccessary to get an quick overview not about the subdomains but the domains. Additionally, … Continue reading

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recursive md5 hashing with Linux

The problem: You need a md5sum of a directory. Unfortunately, md5sum just accepts files as input. The solution: Let’s use find! Okay. Here we go: find DIRECTORY -type f -exec md5sum ‘{}’ \; | md5sum – | awk ‘{print $1}’ … Continue reading

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