Vicky’s server guides

Have you ever had problem updating perl via yum and yum spitting a conflict error message at you?  I’ve met this problem on few CentOS 5 boxes of mine and thought I share the solution.

I happens on 64bit boxes and the error is for example like this

file /usr/share/man/man1/splain.1.gz from install of perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386
file /usr/share/man/man1/xsubpp.1.gz from install of perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386
file /usr/share/man/man3/CGI.3pm.gz from install of perl-5.8.8-32.el5_7.6.x86_64 conflicts with file from package perl-5.8.8-32.el5_6.3.i386

Obviously it is a problem of having a i386 version along the 64bit. First you need to remove the i386 version and then install perl again. You can do it by executing this command:

yum -y remove perl.i386 && yum -y install perl

It should work and you end up with a correct installation of perl. Until the next update

Recently I have fallen for Battlefield 3 and this game forced me to buy a new gaming mouse. Early x-mas   I decided to buy Roccat Kone+ and was surprised this mouse has upgradable firmware. The one I purchased had old fw so I decided to upgrade it.. However, it did not work and I did many attempts, turned on/off antivirus, and all other software that could block the upgrade process. Then I was advised to try older version of drivers and then try the latest one and this procedure worked… therefore I bring you step by step instructions how to upgrade driver and firmware on your Roccat Kone+ mouse..

Only in case the regular procedure with latest drivers ( 1.49/1.45 ) doesn’t work, please go ahead with the following workaround!

1.)     Uninstall the driver completely
2.)     Install the driver “1.45/1.40″
http://www.roccat.org/Support/Gaming-Mice/ROCCAT-Kone-/

<<<In case the firmware update should not start automatically, do the following steps (otherwise skip step 3+4 and go ahead with 5!)>>>

3.)     Go to your C:\Programs\ROCCAT\Kone[+] Mouse\FWupdate
4.)     Execute the Kone[+] Firmware Updater.exe

5.)     Now uninstall the driver 1.45/1.40 again.
6.)     Finally install the most recent driver 1.49/1.45
http://www.roccat.org/Support/Gaming-Mice/ROCCAT-Kone-/

This worked for me and it is the official procedure that Roccat advises. Feel free to leave comments if this worked for you too! Enjoy gaming with this great mouse.

If you are on cpanel (or any other centos server) and need the security feature that root cannot log in via ssh (I will cover this elsewhere) you can do it by adding new user by using these commands:

# adduser testuser
# passwd testuser

that will create the user “testuser” and prompts you to enter his password

With this you would not be able to su to root, therefore you need to add this user to wheel group by using command:

# usermod -f wheel testuser

Voila, now user “testuser” will be able to su – to root and you can disable direct root login in your ssh configuration.

Do you use your spare server power to compute BOINC projects? Seti@Home or MilkyWay or some others ?

You surely encountered error on CentOS 5 or RHEL 5 these errors:

./boincmgr: error while loading shared libraries: libXcomposite.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
./boincmgr: error while loading shared libraries: libXdamage.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
The cure is actually pretty easy, you just need to install the missing libraries

yum install libXcomposite libXdamage

And your problem should be vanished.. Also, you may need these libraries, but those should be installed by default: zlib, openssl, curl-devel

Happy computing

Rkhunter is an intrustion detection program for Linux OS which has been widely used by many server administrators. Sometimes there is a false alarm but most of the time you need to check the problematic areas Rkhunter points out.

NEW: November 30th 2009 – Rkhunter v.1.3.6. is available and this how-to is updated.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Boelen, the author of RKHUNTER rootkit checker has made another nice auditing tool – Lynis. It works on many Linux/Debian/MacOS/BSD systems and provides you the admin important information about system configuration and security issues.

Update: On 15th December 2009 there was version 1.2.9 released. I updated this how-toa bit late, but better than never .

Read the rest of this entry »

If you need to enable GD to your php installation and do not want to recompile whole Apache then there is easy solution.

You just execute command  /scripts/installgd  as root on your cPanel server and you are set.

To enable phpmyadmin at cpanel server to import zipped mysql dumps you need to reconfigure internal cpanel php installation..

Edit /var/cpanel/easy/apache/profile/makecpphp.profile.yaml
Change: Cpanel::Easy::PHP5::Zip: 0=0
To: Cpanel::Easy::PHP5::Zip: 1
Save the file
Run `/scripts/makecpphp`

before running the last command make sure the file /var/cpanel/easy/apache/profile/makecpphp.profile.yaml is chattr +i.

I really started to like nginx web server, and here is my procedure step by step how to install this server on CentOS 5.4

yum install gcc pcre-devel openssl-devel
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-0.7.65.tar.gz && tar xvfz nginx-0.7.65.tar.gz
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nginx --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_gzip_static_module
make
make install
ln -s /usr/local/nginx/conf /etc/nginx
ln -s /usr/local/nginx/logs /var/log/nginx
ln -s /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx /usr/sbin/nginx

Then grab this init script for red hat from http://wiki.nginx.org/RedHatNginxInitScript and put it in /etc/init.d/nginx file. Chmod 755 the file and you are ready.

If you run mytop on RHEL server (or CentOS 5.x) you may get error message saying

Error in option spec: “long|!”

You should edit file /usr/bin/mytop and comment out this line

“long|!” => \$config{long_nums},

after that, run mytop and all should work fine.

Enjoy!