Admin Blogishness

I read a number of individual comments about “server security”, and how individuals focus more on “security” and less on “customer usability”, and it just makes me wonder HOW individuals get away with pulling such ridiculous stunts. Well, here’s a few tips from someone who’s been in the game a while. I’m not going to tell you HOW to do this (I don’t reveal any secrets), but a few good tips should be all it takes.
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Probably one of the most important things you will have to do in your life as a systems admin is BACKUPS. Typically, you can rsync things from A to B, and then reverse to restore. HOWEVER, there are certain things that this should never be done for. One of those very critical things is MySQL.
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Running 2 webservers myself, both very intense in SQL services (what server isn’t any more?), I found that SQL can be ugly, it can be just downright ugly, especially when NOT optimized on a frequent basis. Today, I’ll go through a very simple trick and script to optimize your SQL databases. Doing this saves me 10-20 meg a day in backups.

Tomorrow, how to create daily SQL backups OUTSIDE of your control panel, and restore from them if necessary!
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So, on setting up a few new servers tonight for a client, I ran into the following error

[root@server ~]# rpm -e httpd httpd-suexec httpd-devel php php-pear php-devel php-imap
service httpd does not support chkconfig
error: %preun(httpd-2.0.52-32.3.ent.centos4.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
[root@server ~]#

What happened here? This was a stock CentOS4 server (completely updated). How to resolve? Read more to find out.
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With CPanel 11 rolling out as stable, you’d be surprised to see the number of individuals I get with this response:
I can’t access CPanel/webmail/etc. When I try, I get the following error

The server was configured to not permit you access to the specified resource. If you believe this is in error or inadvertent, please contact the
system administrator and ask them to update the host access files.

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So, finally, the day has arrived. I woke up around 3am because of an alert from a client’s server. Services down, so naturally, I responded.
Being the kind of person that doesn’t (rather can’t) just go back to bed, I looked to see what had progressed the past few days with a few things. Lo and behold, I found that php 5.2.1 was released and attempted to update it via the “cpanel” way.
So, by now you’re probably wondering <em>what the fork is a2, and what does it have to do with CPanel?</em>. The answer is quite simple: Continue Reading»

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