Tweet Hi there! Backing up your code repository is important. Backing up your code repository to an off-site location in a secure manner is imperative. Throughout our travels and experience utilizing the SVN code repository system, we have developed a quick bash script to export the entire SVN repository, encrypt it, compress it into an [...] Read More
SVN Pre Commit Hook : Sanitize your Code!
Tweet Hello, Dealing with several different development environments can be tricky. With SVN specifically, it is ideal to have some “pre-flight” checks in order to make sure some basic standards have been followed. Some of the things you would want to check might be : - Does the code generate a fatal PHP error? - [...] Read More
Add your Dynamic IPs to Apache HTACCESS files
Tweet Hello! We threw together a quick & simple script to dynamically update your .htaccess files within apache to add your dynamic IP address to the allow / deny fields. If you’re looking to password protect an admin area (for example) but your office only has a dynamic IP address, then this script might be [...] Read More
Automated Amazon EBS snapshot backup script with 7 day retention
Tweet Hello there! We have recently been implementing several different backup strategies for properties that reside on the Amazon cloud platform. These strategies include scripts that incorporate s3sync and s3fs for offsite or redundant “limitless” backup storage capabilities. One of the more recent strategies we have implemented for several clients is an automated Amazon EBS [...] Read More
Massive Amazon Route53 API Bind Zone Import Script
Tweet Hello there, Occasionally some of our managed services work has us dealing directly with other cloud providers such as Amazon. One of our clients set a requirement to migrate over 5,000 domain’s to Amazon’s Route53 DNS service. There was little doubt that this could be automated, but since we have never done this massive [...] Read More
Checking and repairing mysql replication automatically
Tweet Hello! MySQL replication has been known to easily break, as a result of a large multitude of potential causes. Sometimes the replication can even break if an erroneous query is executed on the master server. With all the potential issues that may break replication, we thought it prudent to write an automated check script [...] Read More
Clone a XEN VPS server that resides on a LVM / Logical Volume Manager
Tweet Hello! We thought it would be important to share this information as it might be interesting to someone who wants to replicate the same VPS across many instances in order to create a farm of web servers (for example). This uses very similar concepts to our LVM XEN backup post a while back. Step [...] Read More
Varnish Caching with Joomla
Tweet Hello There! One of the exciting new technologies to come out in the last few years is a tremendously efficient and dynamic caching system called Varnish (see : http://www.varnish-cache.org). We have been employing the use of Varnish for high traffic websites for the purposes of user experience improvements as well as for redundancy and [...] Read More
Centralized remote backup script with SSH key authentication
Tweet Greetings, It has been a while since we posted any useful tidbits for you , so we have decided to share one of our quick & dirty centralized backup scripts. The script relies on ssh key based authentication, described here on this blog. It essentially parses a configuration file where each variable is separated [...] Read More
Migrate from Linux to Xen with Rsync
Tweet I decided to write this little guide to provide the relatively simple steps needed to migrate your linux system to a Xen (HVM) virtual instance. It is assumed that on your source and destination boxes, that you only have one root “/” partition. If you partitioned out your file system differently, you will have [...] Read More
Creating a Xen template
Tweet One way to increase the efficiencies of Xen based systems is to utilize templates. VMware talks about this in their whitepaper for ESX2 best practices. With Xen, you have to create your own. Here is a straight forward guide for how to do it. 1. Bootstrap a DomU named -tpl (e.g. centos4-tpl). I recommend [...] Read More
MySQL Query Log – diagnosing and debugging mysql
Tweet The general query log is a general record of what mysqld is doing. The server writes information to this log when clients connect or disconnect, and it logs each SQL statement received from clients. The general query log can be very useful when you suspect an error in a client and want to know [...] Read More
Remove mail headers in Postfix outgoing mail
Tweet This post is intended for people who want to set up Postfix to remove specific headers within emails that pass through their systems. The most common use for this is to set up a relaying server that will remove any reference of where source emails originated and relevant information about the sender’s computer. Another [...] Read More
Automatically Deploy Debian Firewalls with bash scripting
Tweet Automation is as necessary as any other aspect of systems administration in any critical or production environment where growth and scalability are moving at a significant pace. Growth in any organization is obviously a good thing. In the systems administrator’s perspective, however, growth can mean more time spent deploying systems and less time spent [...] Read More
Relay Exim mail to google mail in Debian Linux
Tweet Sometimes its necessary to relay your mail through a third party provider. If your server environment has a dedicated sendmail server (most do), then this scenario is applicable to you. It is ideal to centralize your outgoing mail to one server so that changes, policies and configuration is located in a single place. In [...] Read More
Integrate your custom IPTables script with Linux
A custom iptables script is sometimes necessary to work around the limitations of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux firewall configuration tool. Read More
Troubleshooting Mail : Basic Tips
The purpose of this document is to describe how mail gets from one users email client to another users mailbox. Each action that takes place can be tested and verified by an some level of admin with a few exceptions. After going through this document you should understand what takes place when a user sends email or has email sent to them. Read More
Quick tips using FIND , SSH, TAR , PS and GREP Commands
Administering hundreds of systems can be tedious. Sometimes scripting repetitive tasks, or replicating tasks across many servers is necessary. Read More