While attempting to diagnose a problem where there are a couple of (orphaned) virtual machines as identified by the VMware vSphere Client, one of interest seemed to have all the files in the datastore, however, upon closer inspection the .vmx file was zero byte. The .vmx file can be rebuilt with the vmware.log file. Basically, I downloaded the most recent…
Read More »vsftpd (“Very Secure FTP Daemon”) is an FTP server for Linux and supports PAM (“pluggable authentication modules”). A virtual user cannot login to the Linux system and is considered more secure than using a “real” user whom can login to a Linux system. This guide offers a script that demonstrates one way to setup a vsftpd server using PAM with…
Read More »Unison is self described as “a file-synchronization tool for [Linux]. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.” Install Unison has no available RPM for CentOS…
Read More »Running the command ps to display a list of currently running processes may display a UID instead of the username. There is a reasonable explanation for that. An example command may look like this May return something like 501 28373 15080 0 … You may have expected a return like thisismyuser 28373 15080 0 … This behavior occurs because: Why…
Read More »A situation existed where a user needed access to a CentOS 6 server to provide support for a specific application. This application is associated with a unique username to that application. For the sake of argument, an application xyz has a user xyz which automatically puts that user in a group of the same name, xyz. The additional user whom…
Read More »
To get an instance of Drupal running on a fresh and minimal install of CentOS7/RHEL7 is the goal. Here is an automated scripted install for Drupal on CentOS7/RHEL7 Linux. It is not all inclusive. It doesn’t take into accounts a MariaDB password or MariaDB hardening. Just a quick script to get things running rather quickly, preferably on a development environment….
Read More » Every now and again, you get the urge to try something new. Drupal is the project for today. The goal is to create an automated script to install Drupal on a fresh and minimal install of CentOS 6. Here is an automated scripted install for Drupal and drush, a command line supplement, on CentOS6/RHEL6 Linux. The script is not all…
Read More »The preference for me is to work on a Linux box in a terminal. However, recently encountered the need for GUI. I happened to have a CentOS 7 install with GUI, but the default boot will boot into NON-GUI. GUI to CLI to GUI Commands # Check the current settings systemctl get-default # Change to GUI mode. systemctl set-default graphical.target…
Read More »
Sometime ago, I wrote an automated script to install WordPress on a CentOS 5 install of Linux. Over the years, the repos and WordPress requirements changed as did CentOS upgrades through CentOS 6. The script was modified accordingly. The script had to be modified considerably for CentOS 7 which facilitates the need for a new article. Here is an automated…
Read More »There are many tools to check the hard drive performance on Linux system. Here we are are concentrating on hdparm. A CentOS 6.7 Linux distribution is what is being used for this article. To install it, yum install -y hdparm. A sample run, hdparm -Tt /dev/sda The man pages (man hdparm) will offer many different configuration options, the two switches…
Read More »A typical situation is one where there is a directory that contains many files. Maybe 100s of files or more. Searching through however many files for a specific string can get annoying, however, here are a couple of ways to do just that. Note that there are many more, but this really isn’t the point of this article. A use…
Read More »htop, an interactive process viewer for Linux. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals). It is a powerful alternative to using the top command. Here is a little script to install htop, which can easily be applied to any number of other simple installs too. After creating the script and making it an executable, run the script…
Read More »If you are using something like imap.mail.yahoo.com or outlook.office365.com and would like to add a firewall rule to open the appropriate IPs to access could be quite a challenge. These IPs seem to change often. Here are a couple of command lines that may help sort through this mess. Typically, a simple command would be executed with results. nslookup outlook.office365.com…
Read More »Rootkit Hunter is a security monitoring and analyzing tool for POSIX compliant systems. Well, at least that is the official definition for this utility. From the man pages, rkhunter is a shell script which carries out various checks on the local system to try and detect known rootkits and malware. It also performs checks to see if commands have been…
Read More »
One of the MySQL servers was running out of space, it turned out to be over 7GB of bin logs filling up the hard drive rather quickly. Since this server is not replicating, then a few modifications to the my.ini or my.cnf file will disable this “feature”. Edit the my.cnf file. Yours may be somewhere so search for it with…
Read More » Every now and again a MySQL root password may have been forgotten or undocumented along the way, but that does not negate the need to access the MySQL server. There is a way to gain access to the MySQL server to change the password for root and eventually log in as root. Applies to: CentOS / RHEL / Scientific Linux…
Read More »
Using a CentOS 7 box running a Plex Media Server and an Apache reverse proxy on the same box without a domain name and only an IP address and after much trial and error, a working Apache configuration file finally materializes. The goal was to eliminate the need of typing the port number to access the Plex Media Server web…
Read More »