Recently, I experienced an issue with a MySQL instance running on a CentOS 5.4 host whereby applications were unable to contact the daemon. This was despite there being being no network issues and the operating system not reporting any excessive load. Restarting MySQL fixed the issue and allowed the applications to continue working. While investigating […]
Ubuntu MySQL Upgrade Issue
I recently had to assist a friend who is hosting sites on an Ubuntu VPS; he found himself unable to connect to local MySQL instance as root.Obviously, my first suggestion was to simply reset the password using the –skip-grant-tables trick that’s well documented elsewhere online. However, attempting to stop the MySQL instance using the command […]
Getting Back to Your Root(s)
After performing an upgrade of my work laptop from Fedora 11 to 12, I needed to restore access to my virtual machines. My upgrade consisted of booting off the installation media and wiping all the partitons and volumes that didn’t contain important data, essentially leaving me with a fresh install of Fedora 12. As I […]
Building an RPM
While attempting to install the Snort IDS and the corresponding logging tool, Barnyard, onto a production x86_64 CentOS 5 server, I found myself in a situation where I would have to produce my own binary RPMs. On the Snort site, there is only an i386 binary RPM and a source RPM for Snort iself, while […]
Jive SBS Employee on RHEL – Logrotate Warnings
While working with the social platform Jive SBS (in particular, the Employee Community) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 x86_64 I came across an issue with the system’s logrotate configuration. The issue only became noticeable when I configured the host system to redirect all email destined for the root user to my own email account. […]
mlocate DB Size Problem
I have just had to resolve an issue with the mlocate search tool on a backup server.The machine is a small (10GB) VM with an iSCSI volume presented to it for data that is backed up. It turns out the mlocate DB had grown to an excessive size (>1GB!) because it had been including this […]
Forwarding Traffic with IPTables
The netfilter/iptables tools for Linux can be used to route traffic destined for a particular host to another. An example where this might be useful is when migrating a service from one host to another and waiting for DNS changes to propagate, you want to ensure that all traffic destined for a particular host name […]