How to install dig in Ubuntu
dig is a very useful utility to help webmaster and server admins alike. To install dig, just run the following in Ubuntu
Play all media formats on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Desktop
I still remember the first time I test-drove Mandriva Linux (formerly known as Mandrake), I could run every other audio and video format out-of-the-box without downloading anything (it was a dialup modem era so downloading was a pain-in-the-rear). Many years after, I finally installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my new laptop but it does not recognize some of my mp3 files and im like "Are you kidding me?" Im glad I found a solution, there is a package called ubuntu-restricted-extras (read the Wikipedia entry and Ubuntu documentation) that you can install and it support all major media formats, Codecs and even Flash Player. To install, you need to run Legal Notice Patent and copyright laws operate differently depending on which country you are in. Please obtain legal advice if you are unsure whether…
Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’!
Error: Could not stat() command file '/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd'! The external command file may be missing, Nagios may not be running, and/or Nagios may not be checking external commands. An error occurred while attempting to commit your command for processing. Return from whence you came Just do the following Also change group of the file And also, you may need to do the following and restart apache afterwards Note: This tutorial is written keeping in mind Ubuntu distribution, on CentOS, things are a little different
How to find specific files and send alerts
Maintaining a shared hosting server is a full time job but tools and proper checks and balances can help make this burden lot less. I manage a shared hosting server for one of my friends and numerous times the scripts that people have installed over on their websites have vulnerabilities and hackers exploit it to upload stuff that mass-email or do other nasty stuff. Luckily, most of these exploits have common patterns like files names or other signatures that make them traceable (most of the time the so called hackers are just kiddy scripts) Create a file and put this in it This is a small script that finds specific named scripts in the /home directory (mostly cPanel servers). You can put this in the crontab to do a scan…
package-cleanup: command not found
I tried to do package-cleanup and found this If I was on Ubuntu, I would have done "apt-get install package-cleanup" but it does not work that way on CentOS, its actually available in yum-utils package, install it by typing Enjoy!!
How to configure repos to not overwrite base packages?
The greatest fear with adding additional and especially third party repos such as EPEL (we did a blog post on how to install EPEL earlier) is that it MAY overwrite base packages and bring the system to an unstable state. We can fix this issue by installing Yum Priorities plugin on CentOS 5: on CentOS 4 or CentOS 6: Then make sure that the plugin is enabled Now there are two ways to do it, either set HIGHEST priority to CentOS repos OR set lowest priority to other repos. This is done by adding the line In this blog post, I will set 1 as the priority (highest) for my CentOS Base repo So that it becomes Other repos do not need updating since I have assigned CentOS repos with…
How to fix ‘Crontabs not running’ problem
I have a VPS that I am using for a cPanel DNS-only setup and I was wondering why crontab was not running on this particular VPS. In my particular case, logwatch (a package on CentOS) was not sending me emails. Yes, the settings were correct to send me emails. (more…)
How to change time and/or timezone in CentOS
Generically, I use this Change directory to /etc Now create a symbolic link (aka symlink) to the timezone e.g. Asia/Karachi (for Pakistan standard time) Please note that the timezone is following a directory-structure so if you want EST time, you should use
How to disable SELinux
SELINUX is a security feature on CentOS but some software such as SolusVM will require that SELINUX be disabled The solution? 1) Edit /etc/selinux/config using your favourite editor and set SELINUX=disabled 2) and don't forget to reboot your system
CentOS minimal template’s issue with crontab
On my CentOS 5.x 64bit XEN PV template (XEN PV is a virtualization type, this means I am talking about a VPS) doing 'crontab -e' gave me the following error To correct this issue, do the following So, now if you do 'crontab -e' it will work as it should